Vice involves a complicity more profound and immediate than any verbal communication. It suffuses the body instantaneously like an inner melody, completely transmogrifying mind, flesh, and blood. In the fraction of a second that Clara’s legs touched mine, vast new hopes, vast new expectations were born in me.
With Clara I understood it all from the first day, the first instant. She was my first complete and normal sexual adventure. It was an adventure full of torments and misery, fears and the gnashing of teeth, yet it could have come close to love had it not also been a long, painful bout with impatience. Clara was as calm and capricious as I was bold and impulsive. She had a violent way of provoking me and took a sordid joy in watching me suffer, a joy that always preceded the sexual act and was part of it.
The first time the thing I had so long awaited came to pass, the provocation was of a simplicity so elementary (brutal almost) that the words she used — especially the anonymous verb — retain much of the virulence they had then. All I need do is think back on them and my present indifference is eaten away as if by acid.
Eugen was away on errands. The two of us were alone and silent. Clara — in her afternoon dress, her legs crossed, her back to the shop window — was knitting away at something. Several weeks had passed since the back-room adventure, which had immediately created an icy atmosphere between us, and the ensuing tension found expression in utter indifference on her part. We would sit facing each other without exchanging a word for hours, yet hovering above the silence was a secret accord, a perfect understanding threatening to explode. All that was wanting was the mysterious word to break through the cloak of convention. At night I would make dozens of plans, and the next day they would come up against the most basic obstacles: she had to finish her knitting, the light was wrong, the shop too quiet, the set-up of the sewing machines too important to be disturbed, even for motives of sentiment. I kept my jaws clenched the whole time: the silence was terrible, a silence that for me had all the force and shape of a scream.
It was Clara who broke it. Speaking in what was nearly a whisper and never lifting her eyes from her knitting, she said, “If you had come earlier today, we could have done it. Eugen left right after lunch.”
Until that point there had been no trace of sexual allusion between us, and from those few words a sudden new reality burst forth. It was as extraordinary, as miraculous as if a marble statue had sprung up out of the floor in the midst of the sewing machines.
I was at her in a flash. I grabbed her hand and stroked it violently, kissed it. She pulled it away. “Let me go,” she said, annoyed.
“Come to me, Clara. Please. .”
“It’s too late. Eugen is on his way back. Let me go, let me go.”
I touched her feverishly all over — her shoulders, breasts, legs. .
“Let me go,” she protested.
“There’s still time,” I begged.
“Where?”
“In the back room. Come on. It’s perfect.”
As soon as I said the word “perfect,” my chest welled with hope. I kissed her hand again and pulled her off the chair by force. She let me drag her along the floor.
From that day on, our afternoon “habits” underwent a change. There was still the same Eugen, still the same Clara, still the same sonatas (though I could no longer stand the violin and could hardly wait for Eugen to leave); I was in the same room, but my concerns were different. It was if I were playing a new game on a board designed for a game I had outgrown.
Each time Eugen left, a period of waiting began, one much more arduous than what I had known till then. The silence in the shop was like a block of ice. Clara would sit by the window, knitting. This was the “beginning” to each day, the beginning without which our adventure could go no further. Sometimes Eugen left when Clara was in the back room half-naked, and at first I thought that would speed things along. I was wrong: everything had to begin in the shop. I had to wait until she put her clothes on and went over to the window so she could open the afternoon book to page one.
I would sit opposite her on a stool and talk to her, beg her over and over, implore her. I knew it was in vain: Clara did consent but rarely, and even then she would resort to a ruse to rob me of complete acquiescence. “I’m going into the back room to take an aspirin. I’ve got a splitting headache. Please don’t follow me.”
I swore I wouldn’t and immediately ran after her. A veritable battle would ensue, but Clara was clearly inclined to yield: she would fall on the sofa in a heap as if she had just tripped over something, then put her hands behind her head, close her eyes, and pretend she was going to sleep. It was impossible for me to move her body so much as an inch. I had to pull her dress down over her legs before I could press against her. She put up no resistance, nor did she give me any assistance: she remained as immobile and indifferent as a piece of wood, and had it not been for her intimate, secret warmth I would never have known that she “knew.”
It was about this time that the doctor who prescribed quinine was called in. The impression I received during the visit, the impression of his resemblance to a mouse was confirmed, as I mentioned above, by a freakish, totally absurd incident.
One day I was lying next to Clara, feverishly tugging at her dress, when I had a feeling there was something out of the ordinary in the room. It came more from the vague yet acute intimation of the extreme pleasure I was anticipating and could not share with a foreign presence than from anything tangible, but I was under the impression that we were being watched by a living being.
Alarmed, I turned my head, and what did I see on the trunk, just behind Clara’s powder compact, but a mouse. It had paused next to the mirror on the edge of the trunk and was staring at me with its tiny black eyes. The lamplight had given them two gleaming golden spots, which pierced me deeply and peered into my own eyes for several seconds with such intensity that they seemed to penetrate my brain. Perhaps the creature was searching for a curse to call down on me or perhaps for a mere reproach, but its fascination soon ran its course and it suddenly disappeared behind the trunk. I was certain the doctor had come to spy on me.
This supposition was confirmed that very evening as I took my quinine. Illogical though my reasoning was, I found it perfectly acceptable: the quinine was bitter. The doctor had seen the pleasure Clara could give me in the back room and to get even he had prescribed the nastiest medicine on earth. I could just hear him ruminating over his verdict: “The grrreater the pleasure, the more bitter the rrremedy.”
A few months after he first treated me, he was found dead in his attic: he had put a bullet through his brain.
The first thing I asked myself when I heard the gruesome news was, “Were there mice in the attic?” I needed to know. Because if the doctor was well and truly dead, a band of mice would have to set upon his corpse and extract all the mouse matter he had borrowed during his lifetime to be able to carry on his illegal human existence.
Chapter Three
I was, I believe, twelve years old when I first met Clara. But no matter how far back my childhood memories go, they are always linked to sexual awareness. I find my early experiences of sexuality every bit as nostalgic and pure as my early experiences of night, fear, or friendship, and in no way dissimilar to other melancholy phenomena such as the tedious wait to “grow up,” which I measured concretely each and every time I shook hands with someone older than myself, trying to determine to what extent the weight and size of my tiny hand, lost in a mass of gnarled fingers, differed from the enormous one pressing it.