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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was partly because I idly disliked any intrusion into my constant leisure—my leisure itself having taken on an urgent, all-consuming quality—that I instinctively repelled the idea. But it was not, after all, impossible. ‘I’ll think about it, of course,’ I said non-committally. ‘Give me a few days.’ He was extremely grateful. And of course he would be able to see the shape and possibilities of the whole project, when I had barely begun to imagine what it might entail. Suddenly he looked drained again. ‘We’ll go upstairs, my dear, and then you’d better push off.’ We left the Romans in the dark, and climbed to the hall, where I handed my host over to a silently hostile Lewis. He held him there, almost by force, in the picture-lined gloom, and together they watched me fumble with the lock, and let myself out. When I arrived in the changing-room Phil was drying: not the preliminary stand-up towelling but those final points to which he paid so much attention, and which were executed sitting down. Naked on the bench, legs wide apart, one foot raised in front of him, he rubbed his towel carefully between each toe, and patted powder (I looked, yes, Trouble for Men!) into the dry pink crevices. I approached him at an angle—noticed how his ass spread on the cheap deal of the bench, showing just a shadowy hint of hair between the buttocks, admired the band of muscle which had begun to harden above his hips, and coming round him and picking a locker not far away, glanced down at his cock and balls trailing on the edge of the seat. He looked up at me for a second with his dark, bright, expressionless eyes. ‘Hi, Phil.’ ‘Hullo,’ he said, glancing up again. There was something more than usually inhibited about his manner, and his selfconsciousness came out in a flush. I was casual in the extreme, walked over to the mirror, looked with satisfaction at myself, and at him. Though I was ostensibly chasing a speck of dirt in my eye, my gaze searched the mirror in more depth, to find his attention flickering time and again towards me. I came back and started undressing. I was so completely accustomed to undressing in changing-rooms that the act had lost that charge which it had for me elsewhere. Still, I felt a small warm amorous hum as I pulled off my shoes, tugged down my jeans and caught Phil’s fleeting inspection of my cock. I stroked it with a single indolent gesture as if to set it free, and to present it to the boy who, with surely affected indifference, was sitting in front of me, pulling on his white ankle-socks. ‘How’s the hotel?’ I asked. ‘Oh, er, okay,’ he said, surprisingly unsurprised that I should know about it. ‘Hard work,’ he added. ‘What do you do in it?’ ‘In the hotel, you mean?’ ‘Indeed.’ ‘Oh. Everything, at one time or another.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  In the showers he was all I cd have hoped for, flawed only by a little appendicitis scar; but he was selfconscious—not, I realised, about nudity, but about showering with whites. He was like other American negro servicemen I’ve seen in the Corry, used to segregation & despite their often transcendent beauty & presence somehow cowed or fearful of rejection. The regulars, however, were impressed, & Fox was very pointedly doing his ‘Get a bunk on last night, Charlie?’ patter, while young Andrews lathered his conversation with my Lord this and my Lord that—which of course impressed Roy in turn. I took him back to Brook St & opened a bottle of champagne. Taha looked at me very knowingly before going off to see his uncle, & then, having the place to myself, I more or less did what I wanted. There was a statutory preamble of remarks about girlfriends and what-have-you, but that out of the way we started kissing & stroking each other pretty uninhibitedly, & stripped off & had it away on the sofa & then on the floor three or four times. I must say he was absolute bliss, with that kind of innocence that so appeals to me, & very manly & friendly—nothing affected or girly about it. I’ve never known anyone ejaculate such quantities. Even the last time, when I brought him off by hand, it shot right up into his face. September 27: In a moment of foolishness I’d given Roy my telephone number. I was out most of the morning & didn’t return home until 5 or so, when I asked Taha if there had been any calls & he said ‘No Sir’ with a noticeably self-satisfied air. It wd have been wonderful to have had Roy again, but I found I was glad not to, & decided that if he shd get in touch I wd not see him. Any repetition wd lack the spontaneity & beauty of yesterday, & I wd rather remember it as one of those rare & wonderful days when two strangers come together in deliberate ignorance of each other for their mutual pleasure.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We went through the hall and into the studio, Bobby for a moment halting and blocking my view before letting me too see what was going on. Staines, stooping over the tripod, his right eye jammed into the viewfinder, was aware of us, and flapped his left arm behind him to keep us back and have us observe professional etiquette while he was concentrating. ‘Try not to smile,’ he said. Leaning against a tall white plinth, shirtless, his skin lubricated, almost glittering in the studio lights, the top button of my trousers undone, Phil grew suddenly guilty and selfconscious. That deep and telling blush of his that I loved pumped up into his cheeks and forehead and into his short back and sides, and soaked downwards, over the strong shaft of his neck, fading into his glossy chest. On the way home we stopped off at the Volunteer, and had a beer outside on the pavement, caught up in that sad, erotic mood of an early evening in summer—working people going home, the first queens coming into the pub, dusty tiredness mixing with anticipation. I gazed up and down the street, said little, and from time to time looked ironically at Phil, I think shocked to find how easily he could be manipulated, slightly sick with a feeling that perhaps I wouldn’t be able to keep him. That afternoon I had turned him into pornography, and I was shaken to find Staines following my own instinct so literally, so instantaneously; proud, too, but with the unease of a sexual braggart. Phil himself had an air of compromised but defiant success about him.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was stuffed with pornography—videos and magazines, many of them still in their rip-off cellophane wrappers. The buying had been prodigal and indiscriminate. ‘You like it?’ I was asked, as if it were a triumph of his own. ‘Well up to a point—but I thought—’ ‘In my country these things, these dirty pictures, do not exist.’ ‘I should be highly surprised if that were the case. What is your country anyway?’ ‘Argentina,’ he said, with a neutrality of tone which showed that this news was likely to have some effect. It made me want to apologise to him; at the same time I could have castigated him for buying up all this trash. Surely if any British self-esteem could have been thought to have survived the recent war it must be something to do with our … cultural values? The top magazine in the suitcase was a tawdry old thing I could remember from schooldays, called Latin Lovers. ‘But what about the war?’ I said dismally, seeing a TV news map of the Southern Atlantic and imagining too the customs-check at Buenos Aires. ‘That’s all right,’ he said, putting his arms around my neck. ‘You can suck my big cock.’ He stood patiently while I unbuttoned his trousers and slid them down over brown hairy thighs. The black briefs I had glimpsed before turned out to be leather. ‘I suppose you bought these today as well,’ I said; and he nodded and grinned as I prised them down and saw the studded leather cock-ring he was also wearing. He had clearly wasted a small fortune in some Soho dump. His assessment of his cock had not, however, been wrong. It was a sumptuously heavy thing, purpling up with blood as the cock-ring bit into the thickening flesh. ‘I’m not a size queen, but …’ would have been my classic formulation of the affair. I hadn’t had anything like it all summer, and gorged on it happily. But Gabriel’s own performance was becoming off-putting. Every few seconds he would make some coarse exhortation, some dumbly repeated catchphrase, and I came to realise with dismay that this trick too he had picked up from crudely dubbed American porn films. ‘Yeah,’ he would croon, ‘suck that dick. Yeah, take it all. Suck it, suck that big dick.’ I took a pause to say, ‘Um—Gabriel. Do you think you could leave out the annunciations?’

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  with whom she Hved happily. Though she was but three-and-twenty, yet, as her husband was nearly fifty, she dressed so modestly that she had more the appear- j ance of a widow than of a married woman She was never seen at weddings or festivities but with her hus- band, whose worth she prized so highly that she pre- ferred it to the good looks of all other men. The hus- band, on his side, knew her to be so discreet, and had so much confidence in her, that he entrusted all the affairs of the house to her prudence. This rich man and his wife were one day invited to the wedding of one of their female relations. D'Avannes was present to do honour to the bridal, and also because he was fond of dancing, in which he ac- quitted himself better than any man of his day. When dinner was over and the ball began, the rich man begged D'Avannes to dance. The latter asked with whom he would have him dance : whereupon the rich man, taking his wife by the hand, presented her to D'Avannes, and said, ''■ If there was a handsomer lady in the room, mon- sieur, or one so much at my disposal, I would present her to you as I do this one, begging you, monsieur, to do me the honour to dance with her." The prince gladly complied ; and he was still so young that he took more pleasure in dancing and skipping than in gazing on ladies' charms. It was not so with his partner, who paid more attention to the handsome figure and good looks of her cavalier than to the dance ; but she took care not to let this appear. Supper time being come, M. D'Avannes took leave of the company and retired to the chateau. The rich man escorted him thither, mounted on his mule, and said to him on the way, " Monsieur, you have to-day done so much honour to my relations and myself that I Third day. \ Q UEEN OP NA VARRE. 2 1; ^ should be ungrateful if I did not make you every offer- ing in my power. I know, monsieur, that lords like you, who have strict and close-handed fathers, have often more need of money than we, who, with our small retinue and good management, do nothing but amass. God, who has given me everything that could be desired in a wife, has thought fit to leave me still something to wish for in this world, since I am deprived of the joy which fathers derive from children. I know, monsieur, that it does not belong to me to adopt you ; but if you please to re- gard me as your servant, and confide your little affairs to me, as far as a hundred thousand crowns may go you shall never want for aid in your need."

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Mersi , he said, nothing more, as he slid the money into his pocket. Then he turned and carefully picked up his crumpled jacket, putting it on slowly, not just out of a need to manage his resources, I thought, but out of a reluctance to leave, so that even as he said again Trugvam si he made no movement toward the door. He went to the refrigerator instead, pulling it open and peering inside. I’m still hungry, he said, I’ll just fry an egg before I go, pet minuti , he said, five minutes. But I stepped toward him and put my hand on his shoulder. Mitko, I said, I’m sorry, I have to sleep, you can eat somewhere else, you have enough for that. And again I did feel sorry, I felt cruel forcing him to leave, though I had fed him and given him money. What would it mean to do enough, I wondered, as I had wondered before about that obligation to others that sometimes seems so clear and sometimes disappears altogether, so that now we owe nothing, anything we give is too much, and now our debt is beyond all counting. Dobre , he said, straightening up, and then once more, trugvam si . He took a few steps toward the door before he paused again, turning to face me. I’m okay now, he said, at first I thought referring to his recovered lucidity, now that the effects of alcohol and of whatever else he had taken were wearing off; but then he stepped closer, saying again Veche sum dobre , and as he placed his hand on my waist I understood what he was offering. I let him pull us together and press his pelvis to mine so that I felt his cock again, and for a moment I allowed my response, the flood of excitement that only he could make me feel. But then he leaned his head toward mine and I put my hand on his chest, not quite pushing him away but stopping his approach. Mite , I said, and then quickly, lest it seem an invitation or an expression of passion, as perhaps it was, ne , I said, and then said it again, ne . He didn’t argue, but he held me a moment longer, rubbing himself against me, grinding against the hardness that was already evident, as if to reassure himself of the effect he had. He was going, he said again, just a moment, and then before I could protest he went to the refrigerator and pulled out another little cup of yogurt.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Maybe all of these clips were from the same concert, or maybe the simple, floor-length white gown she wore in each of them was a sort of signature. Mitko found the video he wanted, and as it began I was moved by the thought that he was granting me access to a private history and so to the intimacy I longed for with him, and that this music, so connected to his past, might allow that intimacy passage across our two languages. And yet, as I watched this woman, who was beautiful with a hollow sort of beauty, I was increasingly repelled by what seemed to me a transparent and entirely artless manipulation. She sang in a choked whisper, affecting an extremity of dignified, photogenic devastation, and at the end of a particularly tragic passage she broke into what seemed to me obviously rehearsed tears, lowering the microphone in a posture of defeat. From time to time, the camera (it was a professional film, an elaborate concert video) positioned itself at the singer’s shoulder, forcing us into greater sympathy with her as we shared her vantage on the thousands of fans stretching out into the darkness. They burst into a kind of ecstasy at the sight of her tears, producing collectively a sound of mingled dismay and joy. Ah, said that sound, here at last is the life of significance, the real life that frees us from ourselves. These thoughts took me away from the moment I shared with Mitko, and made me feel that I too had been played, lured into a sentimentality entirely inappropriate to what was, after all, a transaction. As Mitko continued looking tenderly at the screen, a look that now I suspected was artificial, calculated and sly, I stood up, I put my hands on his shoulders and bent my face once again to his neck. Haide , I said, come on, tasting him and tugging at his shoulders. He tried at first to put me off again, he said we could take our time, the night was long; he was counting on a place to spend that night, and no doubt had experienced hospitality withdrawn by men whose desire dissolved immediately to disgust. But I insisted, wanting to assert something, to set the terms of the evening, to claim, finally, the goods for which I had contracted, to put it as brutally as that; it was something brutal that I wanted.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page Thank you for buying this Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here . The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy . For Alan Pierson and Max Freeman and for Luis Muñoz I MITKO That my first encounter with Mitko B. ended in a betrayal, even a minor one, should have given me greater warning at the time, which should in turn have made my desire for him less, if not done away with it completely. But warning, in places like the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, where we met, is like some element coterminous with the air, ubiquitous and inescapable, so that it becomes part of those who inhabit it, and thus part and parcel of the desire that draws us there. Even as I descended the stairs I heard his voice, which like the rest of him was too large for those subterranean rooms, spilling out of them as if to climb back into the bright afternoon that, though it was mid-October, had nothing autumnal about it; the grapes that hung ripe from vines throughout the city burst warm still in one’s mouth. I was surprised to hear someone talking so freely in a place where, by unstated code, voices seldom rose above a whisper. At the bottom of the stairs I paid my fifty stotinki to an old woman who looked up at me from her booth, her expression unreadable as she took the coins; with her other hand she clutched a shawl against the chill that was constant here, whatever the season. Only as I neared the end of the corridor did I hear a second voice, not raised like the first, but answering in a low murmur. The voices came from the second of the bathroom’s three chambers, where they might have belonged to men washing their hands had the sound of water accompanied them. I paused in the outermost room, examining myself in the mirrors lining its walls as I listened to their conversation, though I couldn’t understand a word. There was only one reason for men to be standing there, the bathrooms at NDK (as the Palace is called) are well enough hidden and have such a reputation that they’re hardly used for anything else; and yet as I turned into the room this explanation seemed at odds with the demeanor of the man who claimed my attention, which was cordial and brash, entirely public in that place of intense privacies.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was important to sit near the back, where it was darker and more went on, but also essential to avoid the attentions of truly gruesome people. Slightly encumbered with my bag I moved into a row empty except for a heavy businessman at the far end. It was not a very good house, so I settled down to watch and wait. Occasionally cigarettes were lit and the men shifted in their seats and looked around; the mood faltered between tension and lethargy. The college boys were followed by a brief, gloomy fragment of film involving older, moustachioed types, one of them virtually bald. This broke off suddenly, and without preamble another film, very cheery and outdoors, was under way. As always with these films, though I relished the gross abundance of their later episodes, it was the introductory scenes, buoyant with expectation, the men on the street or the beach, killing time, pumping iron, still awaiting the transformation our fantasy would demand of them, that I found the most touching. Now, for instance, we were in a farmyard. A golden-haired boy in old blue jeans and a white vest was leaning in the sun against a barn door, one foot raised behind him. A close-up admired him frowning against the sun, a straw jerking between his lips. Slowly we travelled down, lingering where his hand brushed across his nipples which showed hard through his vest, lingering again at his loose but promising crotch. On the other side of the yard, a second boy, also blond, was shifting bags of fertiliser. We watched his shirtless muscular torso straining as he lifted the bags on to his shoulder, traced the sweat running down his neck and back, got a load of his chunky denim-clad ass as he bent over. The eyes of the two boys met; one close-up and then another suggested curiosity and lust. In what seemed to be very slightly slow motion the shirtless boy ambled across to the other. They stood close together, both extremely beautiful, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age. Their lips moved, they spoke and smiled, but as the film had no sound-track, and we heard only the cinema’s throbbing, washing music, they communicated in a dreamlike silence, or as if watched from out of earshot through binoculars. The picture was irradiated with sunlight and, being fractionally out of focus, blurred the boys’ smooth outlines into a blond nimbus. The one in the vest appeared to put a question to the other, they turned aside and were swallowed up into the darkness of the barn. Where did they get them from, I wondered, these boys more wonderful than almost everything one came across in real life?

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He didn’t seem disappointed when I refused this offer; he just folded his page up carefully again and replaced it in his pocket. But he didn’t leave, either, as I had feared he might. I wanted him to stay, even though over the course of our conversation, which moved in such fits and starts and which couldn’t have lasted more than five or ten minutes, it had become difficult to imagine the desire I increasingly felt for him having any prospect of satisfaction. For all his friendliness, as we spoke he had seemed in some mysterious way to withdraw from me; the longer we avoided any erotic proposal the more finally he seemed unattainable, not so much because he was beautiful, although I found him beautiful, as for some still more forbidding quality, a kind of bodily sureness or ease that suggested freedom from doubts and self-gnawing, from any squeamishness about existence. He had about him a sense simply of accepting his right to a measure of the world’s beneficence, even as so clearly it had been withheld him. He looked at his friend, who hadn’t moved to rejoin us after Mitko hid away his tiny stash, and after they exchanged another glance the friend turned his back to us, not so much guarding the door anymore, I felt, as offering us a certain privacy. Mitko looked at me again, friendly still but with a new intensity, and then he tilted his head slightly and moved one hand over his crotch. I couldn’t help but look down, of course, as I couldn’t restrain the excitement I’m sure he saw when I met his gaze again. He rubbed the first three fingers of his other hand together, making the universal sign for money. There was nothing in his manner of seduction, no show of desire at all; what he offered was a transaction, and again he showed no disappointment when reflexively and without hesitation I said no to him. It was the answer I had always given to such proposals (which are inevitable in the places I frequent), not out of any moral conviction but out of pride, a pride that had weakened in recent years, as I realized I was being shifted by the passage of time from one category of erotic object to another. But as soon as I uttered the word I regretted it, as Mitko shrugged and dropped his hand from his crotch, smiling as if it had all been a joke.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  And then, since he did finally turn to leave with his friend, nodding in goodbye, I called out Chakai chakai chakai , wait wait wait, repeating the word quickly and in the precise inflection I had heard an old woman use at an intersection one afternoon when a stray dog began to wander into traffic. Mitko turned back at once, as docile as if our transaction had already taken place; maybe in his mind it was already a sure thing, as it was in mine, though I pretended to be skeptical of the goods on offer, trying to assert some mastery over the overwhelming excitement I felt. I looked down at his crotch and then back up, saying Kolko ti e , how big are you, the standard phrase, always the first question in the Internet chat rooms I used. Mitko didn’t say anything in response, he smiled and stepped into a stall and unbuttoned his fly, and my pretense of hesitation fell away as I realized I would pay whatever price he wanted. I took a step toward him, reaching out as if to claim those goods right away, I’ve always been a terrible negotiator or haggler, my desire is immediately legible, but Mitko buttoned himself back up, raising a hand to hold me off. I thought it was payment he wanted, but instead he stepped around me, telling me to wait, and returned to the line of porcelain sinks, all of them cracked and stained. Then, with a bodily candor I ascribed to drunkenness but would learn was an inalienable trait, he pulled the long tube of his cock free from his jeans and leaned over the bowl of the sink to wash it, skinning it back and wincing at water that only comes out cold. It was some time before he was satisfied, the first sign of a fastidiousness that would never cease to surprise me, given his poverty and the tenuous circumstances in which he lived. When he returned I asked his price for the act I wanted, which was ten leva until I unfolded my wallet and found only twenty-leva notes, one of which he eagerly claimed. Really what did it matter, the sums were almost equally meaningless to me; I would have paid twice as much, and twice as much again, which isn’t to suggest that I had particularly ample resources, but that his body seemed almost infinitely dear. It was astonishing to me that any number of these soiled bills could make that body available, that after the simplest of exchanges I could reach out for it and find it in my grasp. I placed my hands under the tight shirt he wore, and he gently pushed me back so that he could remove it, undoing each of its buttons and then hanging it carefully on the hook of the stall door behind him.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Still, I felt a small warm amorous hum as I pulled off my shoes, tugged down my jeans and caught Phil’s fleeting inspection of my cock. I stroked it with a single indolent gesture as if to set it free, and to present it to the boy who, with surely affected indifference, was sitting in front of me, pulling on his white ankle-socks. ‘How’s the hotel?’ I asked. ‘Oh, er, okay,’ he said, surprisingly unsurprised that I should know about it. ‘Hard work,’ he added. ‘What do you do in it?’ ‘In the hotel, you mean?’ ‘Indeed.’ ‘Oh. Everything, at one time or another. At the moment I’m waiting.’ ‘Mm, me too,’ I agreed. But he was clearly not a person that I could win over with collusive bad jokes. I feared for a second he might take it up literally; his ignoring it suggested that he had understood what I meant—but was incapable of indicating the fact. More silence followed, in which I felt that I had the upper hand. He was now standing and putting on his old-fashioned and manly white underpants. ‘Going to work out?’ he asked. It was his first unsolicited remark to me, and despite its consummate blandness it had the air of being the final fruit of a long internal quest for something to say. ‘That’s right: nothing heavy, you know.’ I was in shorts and singlet now, and tying up my white plimsolls. ‘I’m not aiming to have a beautiful physique like yours.’ Something masculine in him momentarily bridled, though the new pleasure of being called beautiful, which must have been the secret purpose of all his body-work, won over and he smiled with shy pride. ‘Do us a favour,’ he said. It was a moment at which a more experienced person could well have turned to admiration of my own, less ambitious, build. As I prepared to go off into the gym I asked him, ‘What hotel is it you work in, actually?’ He was prefacing every remark with ‘Oh’ as if unsure of the way statements might begin. ‘Oh … the Queensberry, yes.’ ‘Not far from here, then.’ I took my key from the lock. ‘No.’ ‘Well, see you.’ I was making off down the alley of lockers and would soon have been lost to his view, when he said: ‘Yeah, you ought to come over some time.’ I half turned and grinned: ‘I’d like that.’ He didn’t grin back; in fact he looked very serious—and there had been something about the way he said ‘you ought to come over some time,’ casual and comradely and yet pondered, or even rehearsed, that convinced me that this was the same uptight, hungry boy I had blown in the Brutus, and that he needed my help, had passively picked on me as the one to show him what it was all about. I held his gaze a little longer, thinking of saying, ‘Well, how about tonight?’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There was something familiar about him, some faint blur on the screen of memory. Then they turned to look into the shadows beyond, where a figure was moving, in and out of my view, dark—black. I couldn’t see him when his quiet but resonant voice was heard: ‘How’s you boys feelin’?’ ‘Want a bit?’ said the looker, with tartish expressionlessness, holding up the joint. ‘I’m stoned, baby,’ was the reply, melodious, rather stern. When he came forward nonetheless to have a pull on the last papery thumbnail’s length of the joint I knew his handsome, lined face at once, the huge, challenging, mobile eyes, the pink of his inner lips, as if at any second he would lick them clean of raspberry fool. And then of course I knew the boys. ‘Oh Abdul, Abdul,’ Charles was calling, in his most invocative and hammy voice. The chef came over, not now with the serious, solicitous manner of the Club dining-room but with a kind of flirtatious nonchalance, as if he were a fellow member. They shook hands, Charles hanging on as Abdul withdrew his long, powerful fingers. ‘All right, Charlie?’ said the black man genially, amazingly. ‘You remember my young friend William.’ ‘How are you, William.’ He shook my hand too, in a casual fashion, and gave a drugged grin. ‘Come to see the show.’ He looked along to Aldo and Bobby, who clearly needed no introduction, and closing his eyes and biting his lower lip ground his hips around slowly, as if dancing to some very sexy music in his head. I was nearly shocked by this, and dazed and gulping like an innocent. Though he was twice my age I fancied Abdul crazily, was seriously moved by him. I remembered how I had watched those places where his black, black skin disappeared into his white chef’s uniform, the wrists and the long, thick neck, and the awareness I had of his body. As he turned away I followed him with what was probably a look of stricken devotion. It was the high, haunted African brow, and the high, rolling African ass, and the long, dangling, fishing, musical hands. Staines came rattling back in at this point, carrying a camera on a tripod, its legs unsplayed making it tall and unwieldy. I suppose it was inevitable that it would be a film, that this swaying, powerful chef, with all his virile elegance, would be doing something with these common little waiters. I was surprised to remember that Charles had told me there was no dining at Wicks’s on a Sunday evening. But I was staggered to think that he—and Staines—could actually lure the staff elsewhere and make them act out those fantasies which they must have fathered in sly glances over their fatty beef, soapy veg and boiled school puddings. What bizarre transactions and transitions must have taken place. The whole thing had that achieved bizarrerie which made it normal to the participants, demonic to the outsider.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  On the contrary, Augustine commenting on Ps. 68:5 [*Enarr. in Ps. 68], “Then did I restore [Douay: ‘pay’] that which I took not away,” says: “Adam and Eve wished to rob the Godhead and they lost happiness.” I answer that, likeness is twofold. One is a likeness of absolute equality [*Cf. [3621]FP, Q[93], A[1]]: and such a likeness to God our first parents did not covet, since such a likeness to God is not conceivable to the mind, especially of a wise man. The other is a likeness of imitation, such as is possible for a creature in reference to God, in so far as the creature participates somewhat of God’s likeness according to its measure. For Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ix): “The same things are like and unlike to God; like, according as they imitate Him, as far as He can be imitated; unlike, according as an effect falls short of its cause.” Now every good existing in a creature is a participated likeness of the first good. Wherefore from the very fact that man coveted a spiritual good above his measure, as stated in the foregoing Article, it follows that he coveted God’s likeness inordinately. It must, however, be observed that the proper object of the appetite is a thing not possessed. Now spiritual good, in so far as the rational creature participates in the Divine likeness, may be considered in reference to three things. First, as to natural being: and this likeness was imprinted from the very outset of their creation, both on man—of whom it is written (Gn. 1:26) that God made man “to His image and likeness”—and on the angel, of whom it is written (Ezech. 28:12): “Thou wast the seal of resemblance.” Secondly, as to knowledge: and this likeness was bestowed on the angel at his creation, wherefore immediately after the words just quoted, “Thou wast the seal of resemblance,” we read: “Full of wisdom.” But the first man, at his creation, had not yet received this likeness actually but only in potentiality. Thirdly, as to the power of operation: and neither angel nor man received this likeness actually at the very outset of his creation, because to each there remained something to be done whereby to obtain happiness.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Quæst. Ev. ii. 28.) Jesus therefore, the same who said, To him that knocketh it shall be opened, hearing them, stands still, touches them, and gives them light. Faith in His temporal incarnation prepares us for the understanding of things eternal. By the passing by of Jesus they are admonished that they should be enlightened, and when He stands still they are enlightened; for things temporal pass by, but things eternal stand still. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Some interpret that the two blind men are the Gentiles; one sprung from Cham, the other from Japhet; they sat by the way-side, that is, they walked hard by the truth, but they could not find it out; or they were placed in reason, not having yet received knowledge of the Word. RABANUS. But recognizing the rumour of Christ, they desired to be made partakers of Him. Many spake against them; first the Jews, as we read in the Acts; then the Gentiles harassed them by persecution; but yet they might not deprive those who were preordained to life of salvation. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Accordingly Jesus touched the eyes of the Gentile mind, giving them the grace of the Holy Spirit, and when enlightened they followed Him with good works. ORIGEN. We also now sitting by the wayside of the Scriptures, and understanding wherein we are blind, if we ask with desire, He will touch the eyes of our souls, and the gloom of ignorance shall depart from our minds, that in the light of knowledge we may follow Him, who gave us power to see to no other end than that we should follow Him. CHAPTER 21 21:1–91. And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, 2. Saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me. 3. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them. 4. And this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, 5. Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. 6. And the disciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them, 7. And brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon. 8. And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. 9. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ARISTOTLE ’ S TEXT Chapter 1: 980a 21-983a 31. All men naturally desire to know. A sign of this is the delight we take in the senses; for apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves, and most of all the sense which operates through the eyes. For not only that we may act, but even when we intend to do nothing, we prefer sight, as we may say, to all the other senses. The reason is that of all the senses this most enables us to know and reveals many differences between things. 2. Animals by nature, then, are born with sensory power. 3. Now in some animals memory arises from the senses, but in others it does not; and for this reason the former are prudent and more capable of being taught than those which are unable to remember. Those which cannot hear sounds are prudent but unable to learn, as the bee and any other similar type of animal there may be. But any which have this sense together with memory are able to learn. 4. Thus other animals live by imagination and memory and share little in experience, whereas the human race lives by art and reasoning. 5. Now in men experience comes from memory, for many memories of the same thing produce the capacity of a single experience. And experience seems to be somewhat like science and art. 6. But in men science and art come from experience; for “ Experience causes art, and inexperience, luck, ” as Polus rightly states. Art comes into being when from many conceptions acquired by experience a Single universal judgment is formed about similar things. For to judge that this [medicine] has been beneficial to Callias and Socrates and many other individuals who suffer from this disease, is a matter of experience; but to judge that it has been beneficial to all individuals f a particular kind, as the phlegmatic, the bilious, or the feverish, taken as a lass, who suffer from this disease, is a matter of art. 7. In practical matters, then, experience seems to differ in no way from art. ut we see that men of experience are more proficient than those who have theory without experience. The reason is that experience is a knowledge of in singulars, whereas art is a knowledge of universals. But all actions and processes of generation are concerned with singulars. For the physician heals man only incidentally, but he heals Socrates or Callias, or some individual that can be named, to whom the nature man happens to belong. Therefore, if anyone has the theory without experience, and knows the universal but not the singulars contained in this, he will very often make mistakes; for it is rather the individual man who is able to be cured.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I thought of how often, for all his ebullience, I had seen Mitko sick, his colds, the ear infection he had had for weeks, the herpes that sometimes disfigured his mouth; I thought of his drinking and the risks of his trade, and for an instant I wanted desperately to save him, though from what exactly and how I wasn’t sure. I knew it was a ridiculous desire, that it imagined a relationship I didn’t want; and I also knew Mitko had never expressed any desire of his own to be saved. He was in an Internet café (every now and again I saw someone walk by behind him), and he made more and more use of the keyboard as we talked, typing comments that were too suggestive for him to speak out loud. This had the effect he intended, overwhelmingly when he stood and under the pretext of stretching displayed his body to me, reaching into his pockets to pull the folds of his jeans tight against his crotch. By the end of the conversation, surprising myself, I had proposed to come to Varna at the end of the week, a proposition he was eager to accept. I will be with you the whole weekend, he said, I promise, hundert protzent . Over the next few days I received a number of e-mails from him, as he visited hotels and reported back on prices and their nearness to the sea. It was the sea, as the days passed, that I longed for almost as much as I longed for Mitko, having spent so many months in landlocked Sofia, and it was the thought of the sea even more than of Mitko that I dwelled on for the seven cramped hours I spent on the bus from Sofia to the coast. It was a gray day, cold, more like winter than spring. There were martenitsi pinned to everyone’s clothes, small bundles of red and white yarn exchanged on the first of March, a ritual meant to encourage the year to turn. My own bag was covered with them; students had given them to me with great ceremony, with wishes of health and wealth and happiness, all day long. But there was no magic in them, and for the whole trip a light precipitation fell, sometimes as rain, sometimes as snow.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Live round ’ere, do you?’ he said, squinting up at me provocatively and sarcastically. I smiled again and shook my head. ‘Thought not,’ he said, looking away and snapping the stick up now in his hands. My uneasy imagination saw in this some covert allusion to ‘faggot’. Still, I was determined to have him. It was partly the insolent way he sat and spoke, his overvaluing of his own charms itself making him more sexy. But it was also his youth, and the boredom and randiness of the mid-teens, that got me going. It brought back to me the time, like the erotomaniac nights and days that Charles evoked in his diary, when life was all hanging about and fantasy. It was the mood of long car journeys through France with my mother map-reading for my father, whilst Philippa and I fought or slept in the back seat and I dreamt of men. Then we would arrive at some cathedral town and I would climb out of the car attempting to master an overwhelming erection. During the trip I was drawn compulsively to public lavatories where the drawings and graffiti confirmed my sex-obsessed but impractical view of things, their mystery heightened by repeated but incomprehensible words of argot. As our family group strolled through the square in the evening, dressed in beautiful light clothes, I would drag behind, my gaze searching out the bulging flies of the lads gathered round the war memorial, the clenching buttocks of the boys who slammed the pinball machines just inside the doorways of bars. I didn’t have much time. ‘Do you?’ I said. He stood up and began to wander off. ‘Eh?’ ‘Live round here …’ ‘What d’you think?’ he said. He had this tight, mean, logical talk, highly defensive and dull. I followed him, feeling more and more at a disadvantage—old, too, as people over twenty are to their juniors. He reached the low wall by the road, and turned round, stroking the outline of his quite big dick. Just along the street people were waiting at a bus-stop. It was no place for a scene. I came up close to him and put my hand on his shoulder, and he smiled in a way that for the first time revealed his nervousness. ‘Come on,’ I said, seizing this advantage. But immediately he closed down again; it was with studied shrewdness that he said: ‘How much money ’ave you got, then?’ I nodded my head and chuckled ironically—the only way was to behave like him. ‘Just enough for myself,’ I said. ‘ ’sthat so? Well you’ll need a lot more than that if you want a nice bit of bum round ’ere’—almost in a whisper, as if trying to keep the great bargain he was offering me a secret from the group at the bus-stop.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Exchanging short greetings with a couple of chaps I scarcely knew, I chose a vacant position between a pale, ravaged-looking youth with tattoos snaking up his arms and a huge dark brown man, six foot eight tall at a guess, very round and heavy, with an enormous childish face and not a hair on his head—or, I soon found, anywhere on his body. His sleek, heavy cock, cushioned on a tight, crinkled scrotum, stuck out from beneath a roll of fat. He was soaping himself vigorously, leaving a silky smear over his smooth, plump expanses of back and belly; and with cheery unselfconsciousness singing as he went about it. I nodded to him, as if to say that I could see he was happy enough, then, and he grinned back in a way that suggested a fond, exuberant disposition. I felt that he might stroke me as a golem does some little girl who trusts him, or inadvertently crush me to death. I set down my soap box and shampoo, let the water drum on my shoulders, and looked about. At the Corry the men undress at their lockers, and then bring their towels to the duckboarded place at the end of the shower room. Often those who have swum still have their trunks on and some stud may allow a mocking minute of tension before the languid unknotting of the drawstring, and the peeling down of the tiny garment, freeing the cock and balls in one of the most mundane and heartstopping moments there is. An American guy, I thought, was doing this just now on the other side of the room; square and trim he stood breathing heavily and luxuriating under the water before turning his back and loosening his glittering briefs to reveal a firm hairless ass, milky white between the sun or sunbed-tanned zones of his back and thighs. I still had my really absurdly tiny black trunks on, and felt my cock protesting against their constraint, thickening up, and aching as it did so after the pounding it had lately been taking. At first I used to feel embarrassed about getting a hard-on in the shower. But at the Corry much deliberate excitative soaping of cocks went on, and a number of members had their routine erections there each day. My own, though less regular, were, I think, hoped and looked out for. There is a paradoxical strength in display; the naked person always has the social advantage over the clothed one (though the naked person can forget this, as innumerable farces show), and under the shower I was reckless. The effect of this on others, though, was not necessarily a good thing. It would be vain to pretend that all the men at the Corry looked like the stars of a physique magazine.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘The resolve did wobble a little. But I knew what I had to do, or rather what I had not to do. I hung about for a minute, but as can happen there it dawned on me dismayingly that I was by far the most attractive person in the room, and I wanted something ravishing and epic. I was about to go, I thought I’d tootle down to the Coleherne perhaps, then I wouldn’t be too far away if the bleep went. Then I saw this guy come out of the loo—lean, tanned, denim top and bottom and, what I noticed first of course, a big curving prick sort of lolloping about. He walked through the bar in a very come-and-buy fashion, looked at me, then looked away at once and went out on to the street. I realised who it was, that bloke I was once rather worked up about at the Corry and you were horrid about, very thin but quite muscled and somehow incredibly sexy.’ Out of an unaccustomed sense of decency I had never told James about the afternoon I had had this boy, Colin, had even cut him when I ran into him at the Club with James a week or two later. ‘I think I know the one,’ I said. ‘He was what I really wanted, though the look he gave me wasn’t very encouraging. And then, naturally, having seen what I wanted I came over all incapable, and faffed around at the bar, and then I went to the loo. But when I finally left the pub, it must have been about five minutes later, beginning to feel a bit miz, there he was outside, leaning against the pillar at the corner, one foot raised behind him—very rent-looking, actually, which should have made me wonder, but I found I was talking to him. Really tat stuff about haven’t I seen you at the Corry et cetera, but I know you’ve told me it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you say something. In spite of my earlier doubts, he was amazingly keen and responsive, said where shall we go, I was completely practical and said I had a car just round the corner, we could go to my flat, and suddenly the whole thing had just taken off and I didn’t feel apprehensive at all, just happy, almost, and sexy.’ ‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘Really good.’ I hadn’t liked him much myself but I even felt a shade possessive now about him, and then decided to be generous, and wished James well with him.