She shook her head very slowly, muttered “No,” and I lay down at her side. I wanted to clasp her in my arms again but she gently pushed me away.
“Let’s do whatever you wish,” I said. “Tell me what you would like.”
She took my face in her hands, gazed at it for a while, then whispered, “What I like—really?”
“Really,” I said, and smiled.
She scanned my face for some time more without speaking, then said, “Stretch your arm out behind you.”
I did.
“On the shelf,” she said, “there’s a powder box.”
I groped for it, found it, handed it to her. Her fingers trembled to open it.
“Take some with me,” she said under her breath, in a tone in which prayer and command mingled with an almost incredulous shyness. Had I expected this? Perhaps. In any case I hardly hesitated.
The powder box shook in her hands. She must have read in my eyes that I was willing. Her own eyes sparkled. She held a quivering palm close to my nostrils. I inhaled several times. Her pupils became unbelievably large. Soon my head was spinning exquisitely. I dropped my cheek on the velvet opposite her face. A vast sweetness pervaded me.
I felt a feverish breath on my lips, while someone was saying very low, with an avid curiosity, “Yes?” But I was already so wonderfully weary, carefree and happy that I could only acquiesce with a slight puckering of my eyelids. And later we remained for an immeasurable time without moving, commingling our exhausted breath.
Chapter 28
IF there is something more entrancing than a solitary vice, it is the same vice shared with another. Especially during the initiation when, elated by their secret complicity, master and disciple alike are gripped by a sort of all-consuming passion. One then feels that the slightest falling off in the partner’s pleasure, the briefest pause in his intoxication, is an unbearable letdown. Alone, one may possibly use moderation, exercise restraint; but when there are two, all self-restraint founders. No sooner did Dorothy and I surface from our euphoria than she plunged us into it again, with a kind of ferocious impatience, and I let myself be carried away unresistingly, completely given up to the intoxicating novelty of sensation. And seeing me abandon myself helplessly to her perverse desire must have given Dorothy a particularly intense delight, for I remember hearing her groan as if with sensual pleasure.
We abandoned ourselves to it all with frenzy: to ecstasy and unconsciousness, to the most oblivious indolence and to sudden fits of erotic rapture that would seize us both together. However, I can only recall confused images of all those hallucinating days. And perhaps even they are imaginary. They have no link with one another. Even when it comes to the rare moments of solitude and clearheadedness which I wrested from Dorothy’s grasp in order to assure myself that I was still in control of my will, I am unable to situate them in time and hardly even in space.
I can see myself at my hotel once, in the process of having a bath. But when? Another time, on Battersea Bridge, offering my face to the sea-born breeze as if trying to sober up. Still another time in the street market behind Paddington, but I am with Dorothy, and we are floating like sleepwalkers; we must have left Galveston Lane with our minds still cloudy with drugs.
Apart from that I have only foggy visions, half of which were probably mere dreams. Still, I can see the wallpaper representing parrots amid bamboo reeds—a paper which, though faded, suddenly takes on life and color, and I even hear the rustling of the birds’ wings. For a long time now there is neither day nor night in this room, for Dorothy has drawn the curtains and blinds, as if to enclose us in a warmer, more feverish intimacy. I remember the sour perfume that rises from the body next to me more distinctly than its vague outline under the dim light of the lamp shade. What I recall, however, with illusory precision is Dorothy clad in rags, sitting on the edge of a boat rather like a gondola and filled to the brim with strawberries, peaches, red currants; and also her falling backward and laughing amid the pungent fragrance of the crushed fruit.
But what is this insinuating sweetness that forces my teeth open, fills my mouth with a voluptuous paste which oddly enough I relish, while burning lips crush mine? A naked Dorothy, her hair in the wind, knee-deep in water and surrounded by foam, beckoning to me to join her—I can see her as if I were there; but to whom belongs this graceful, pearly body, shining with sweat and writhing on the divan to clamor for new pleasures? And whence comes, on the ceiling, that sort of lambent dragon or hippograph, at once motionless and dancing? It suddenly slithers silently down the corner of the room, pokes forward a hazy and hilarious head that almost touches me and melts away.
Where are we? No more parrots on the walls but green and blue stripes which quiver like the strings of a harp, a very vague memory of a staircase painfully mounted step by step, and here, on a heavy Smyrna carpet the same pearly body lies crucified on a jumble of fabrics; but flung across it there ripples another body, the color of hot sands, and I see a long heavy, black mane spread over two pale twitching legs. But I feel nothing, nothing but a divine lassitude and a universal benevolence which fills me with comprehension and a happy, infinitely quiet pity. Later I too rumple the same black mane that now spreads over my flanks while I submit to bold caresses, and Dorothy’s disheveled blondness covers both our faces and I hear gasping, meaningless words in my ear.
These are just rare visions among a hundred, but they are all so fluid and evanescent that they escape me as soon as I think I grasp them. Ah, and there are revolting ones too. Can one feel voluptuous pleasure in vomiting? Or is it a memory that has become strangely corrupted? Each spasm of my heaving stomach amplifies in a sensuous swoon and I lie in wait for the next with lascivious expectancy. I also remember a bite—an exchange of bites, I believe. I am digging my teeth into flesh and feel my own shoulder being mauled (I still have the mark). But there is no pain, or rather the pain vibrates deep inside me with the gentle suavity of a cello. Above all these scattered, inconsistent visions, however, there is an all-pervading darkness. A vast, restless obscurity, sometimes faintly melodious, more often pulsating with an endless, droning plaint to which all my flesh responds harmoniously to the very depths of my innermost night…
To be quite frank, when it still happens, at rare intervals, that I suddenly feel coursing through me a fleeting wave of vague nostalgia, it is always for that darkness and for nothing else. All the rest is only scum, the memory of which sickens me a little, the momentary froth formed by the eddies of that nocturnal, marvelously black and boundless ocean, in which I float for a long while in a weirdly conscious unconscious, an ineffable indifference. I know, unfortunately, that this is still so for Dorothy, that for her all things outside this ocean in which she seeks to lose herself are just foamy impurities, bubbles no sooner formed than burst. And I also know that this attraction is most certainly the worst, because at the bottom of that sweet, yawning darkness lurks the octopus of nothingness.
But since I myself am here at my desk, writing this story, I need hardly say that I was able to wrest myself in time from this mortal attraction. The tragedy is that I alone could do so, for I could not bring Dorothy back with me. I abandoned her, as a mountaineer on the verge of being carried away cuts the rope that ties him to his partner, thus saving his life but losing his honor. But now I am convinced that I did the right thing.
For Dorothy was not an inert body at the end of a rope, too dazed to help in her own rescue. On the contrary, she tugged with all her strength, in the wild hope of making me lose my grip, of pulling me down into the chasm with her. Did jealousy, Sylva’s existence, play some part in this ruthless passion, this frenzied and perverse attempt? I am not able to answer with certainty. But I no longer doubt that Dorothy loved me after her fashion, with honesty at first when she ran away, and then, when contrary to expectations I seemed to give myself up to her, with that fierce blaze in which she tried to consume me.