It thus happened that one particularly sour and chilled December noontime, when my wife came unto me and entered my cell, and when the jailor had left us alone and had returned to his post below, the close heat of my cell swiftly brought a blush to her face and encouraged her to unwrap her scarf and shawl, which revealed in the glow of the brazier and my reading candle an illusory fullness through her hips and breasts, an illusory healthy roundness to her arms, and great warmth of illusory color in her throat. I declare it illusory simply because I well knew that the woman had long been ill and pinched by pain and that in my absence she had been forced frequently to deprive herself so that the plates of my children, her step-children, could be filled. Further, I declare it illusory so that it may be known abroad that she did in no way provoke me or otherwise draw from me lustful ambitions. They existed prior to her arrival that noontime and they merely used her presence as an occasion to arise and make themselves known to us. The woman lived purely. She wished no more than to let me beget a new child upon her, a child of her own who would be able someday to tender proper mercy to her when she herself had joined the blessed dead. I, I was the one who had no pure thoughts that day, no thoughts of an unborn child coming to life so as to bless me in death, I was the one whose lust had no ambition other than its own satisfaction, a means with no end, a cause with no effect.
Therefore did I reach out and paw her soft body and draw her to me, and then did I wrench her dress from her body and expose her creamy surface to the flick of candle light and the steady glow of the reddened coals in the brazier, and then did I strip my trousers off, and pulling my wife down, did I cover her with my body and swarm over her for a great long time, until at last did I fall away and, exhausted, uncouple from her.
At first, my response to this act was, of all the possible responses then available to me, the weakest one. I strode down the path of least resistance, as it were, by simply refusing to acknowledge this lustful seizure and the seizures that regularly every afternoon followed it, like links in a binding chain, as being anything more than some natural expression of my body, no less natural than the continued growth of the hair of my head or the hair of my beard or the nails of my fingers and toes. This insistance upon the naturalness of my act was, of course, as the reader must know all too well, nothing but a means of construing the situation so as to be better able to repeat the act, over and over, day after day, until it had become a hideous habit and there seemed to be no way of separating the head of it from the tail. Each time after my wife had wrapped herself once again modestly in her scarf and shawl and had left my presence, I would groan aloud and beat my breast with shame, and each time, before long, I would start up with assurances that what I was doing was no more than any man’s body, so deprived by imprisonment, would wish him to do. I even contrived a clever guard against shame by wheedling out of my intelligence this argument: that to berate myself for having fallen into lustful copulation was to give an unnatural attention to things and events of this life, which was unnecessarily and sinfully to pull my proper attention away from contemplation of the dead. And like a true sophist, I even used scripture to woo me from self-disgust. Leave off undue fascination with and morbid examination of things of the body, I told myself, quoting the sacred book of Walter (x, 42). Thus did I not only debase myself, but I debased the words of the sainted dead as well. And all this in but the very beginnings of my period of transgression! I elaborate on and attend to it here solely that the reader will know that I too have been confronted by the forces of life that would demean and destroy our faith, and I too have walked across the barren desert of my own weakness and have come to the mountains beyond, and I have at last ascended those mountains. I have endured as all men may endure, if they will but will it.
From here my debauch, like a tropical river, broadened and deepened, until it seemed to flow irresistably into a sea of life, a tepid expanse where nothing but teeming forgetfulness and transience may exist, where the permanence of remembered death is denied a place and the singleness of mortal existence, our movement from life to death, has no meaning. For not only did I begin to curtail by an increasing amount of time the period of instruction and prayer each afternoon with my wife, so that I could squirm and roll with her on the mat in the darkened corner of my cell, but I began to vary from one day to the next the modes and positions of our interpenetration. This was, to be sure, a consequence of the regularity of our unbridled comings together, a way of avoiding contact with and recognition of our essential boredom with the act and our deep knowledge of its superfluity and utter gratuitousness, for we had long since removed ourselves from any possible rationalizations such as the begetting of new children. It may also have been the consequence of a newly released idle curiosity. (I credit this motive only to myself; I know that my wife never experienced such a loathsome provocation.) But whatever the cause, before long we were engaged in acts that could only be named beastly, in positions that could only be described as perverse or, if one were inclined toward compassion, as pathetic or, if one were maliciously detached, as comic. And we worked heatedly and furiously, as if we were about to be interrupted and publicly exposed while in the midst of our abominations.
Which, unhappily, is what happened. One afternoon in late December, when my wife and I were feverishly engaged in copulation, from a position that in retrospect now appears grotesque but which at the time functioned on my visual sense so as to draw forward from me a great long surge of erotic attention, my new jailor, a man named Jacob Moon, suddenly appeared at my cell door, which, as was the practice with political and religious prisoners, perpetrators of what were then called crimes of conscience, lay open and unlocked. It was only at night or during a rare emergency or during the visit of some legal dignitary that the cell doors in my section of the prison were closed and locked. This relative freedom of movement was considered a privilege and, more importantly, a tacit acknowledgement of the vague and ambiguous terms of our crimes and the punishments attached thereto, for during those years both the prisoners and the authorities felt that it was to their respective group’s advantage to perpetuate for as long as possible the vagueness and ambiguity of the terms of the crimes and punishments. Now, of course, both parties have taken the opposite position, which accounts for all the recent bouts of litigation, the continuous appeals to higher courts, the rising income of attorneys, and the facts that the cell doors are locked at all times and that many other amenities, such as my coal brazier, have been eliminated. For nowadays the prisoners have come to feel that they must be either wholly free or wholly imprisoned. In previous years, however, since they had feared that the only alternative available to them was total imprisonment and that total freedom was out of the question, and since the authorities feared that total freedom was the option and that total imprisonment was out of the question, both groups had struggled to achieve the mid-point between, a compromise that, because it denied both parties’ worst fears, satisfied everyone. At present neither party is satisfied. And therefore, one of my several tasks here, as I see it, is to try to show both parties the wisdom of the old way.