In the morning I awoke so heavy, weighed down by my hatred. Hard face and brittle voice. I found Hans waiting for me in the garden. He said:
“I am upset about last night, about my insincerity. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean.”
“Didn’t mean?” I repeated, and waited, all wrapped in my silence and watchfulness.
“Your silences are more terrible than other women’s shoutings and sobbing. Yes. I was carried away by my desire to conceal my love. The truth is I was swept away by your tirade. I wanted to kiss you. And then I saw you looking at Andre with such admiration. Your looking at him bothered me.”
“Perhaps you’re acting again,” I said.
“No,” said Hans quietly. “I can’t lie to you.”
“It’s simply that you enjoy difficulties. You like creating troubles. Our few days of harmony aroused your usual craving for discord, for war.”
“No, you’re wrong. I don’t want war. But for a moment I lost confidence in you. You were so enthusiastic about the astrologer, your voice was so warm when you questioned him and talked with him. Tell me something… Oh, well, what a man wants is to believe that a woman can love him so much that no other man can possibly interest her, even if he be a magician!”
What a man wants! (Then we could have again that openness if I were truthful?)
“What a man wants,” I said, “is what I have given you up to now with a wholeness you can never imagine.”
He looked tender and dazed.
“I feel so battered,” I said. “Our first duel has come to an end.”
“It was all very interesting,” said Hans. “I like launching into a role, into a part which baffles those who believe they know me. When you are angry your eyes turn violet. I would like to write that up in the style you used for the story of the opium fiend.”
His unaccountableness will eventually make me lose faith in him. Whenever he or Alraune steps in, the water boils, the lids explode, poison runs through one’s veins.
“You stole a phrase from me only the other day, do you know? You take what you need like a beast feeding. I feel like a human pudding,” I said.
Perhaps, I thought, my desire to preserve the bliss and the peace is a futile effort to resist the flow of life. War is inevitable. It is like snow or rain. Let the avalanche come then: snow, rain, volcanoes, torrents, floods. And with them a gigantic humor. Like an everlasting moon, I want to fix ecstasy in its niche. Hans knows better. It’s good. He forces me back again into isolation. I have no more devotions. I am hungry and I am going to eat; I am going to steal, to sell myself, to wander. I am going to love my own books better than I love Hans’. No more sacrifices for him. If he acts ridiculously, insanely or sentimentally enough for me to hate him I will be able to attend to my own growth and become a magnificent woman. Until now I have been a woman in whose womb men could rest in utter security.
Defeat this tragedy concealed within each hour, which chokes one unexpectedly and treacherously, springing from a melody, an old letter, a line in a book, the color of a dress, the walk of a stranger. How? Make literature! Seek new words in the dictionary, chisel new phrases, pour the tears into a mould. Style, form, discipline. Whip yourself and others into a frenzy. Lie. Exhaust yourself and your capacity for emotion. Cut out the newspaper clippings carefully. Have your photograph taken. Tell everyone what you owe them. Tell your lover he has made you a woman, tell your editor he has discovered a genius, and then turn around again into your solitude. Like a dog biting his tail, or like a scorpion caught in a circle of fire devouring himself, so that when you gaze at your own image you say to yourself: “If the Chinese had not discovered that wisdom is the absenf ideals, I would have discovered it myself to-night.”
He made me lie down on the black rug. But I did not believe in his feelings. I felt I was being possessed by a cannibal.
Hans’ appetite. The gifts I had made him of my feelings. His appetite for my ideas, for my moods, for the books I gave him. How he devoured the vibrancy of my flesh, my thoughts of him, my awareness of him! How he devoured new people, new impressions. His gigantic, devouring spirit, in quest of substance, in quest of inspiration, in quest of exoticism. My fullness, which I knew to be inexhaustible, was soon absorbed by him. My continuous dissolutions and recreations and rebirths, all the changes in me, the opening up of new realms, all this could be thrown into the current of his life and work and be absorbed by it like twigs by a river. He could read the fattest books, tackle the most cumbersome tasks, make the most immense plans, attack the most solemn systems and ideas, produce the greatest quantity of writing. He had the appetite of the age of giants. He excluded nothing. Everything was food: the trivial and the puerile, the ephemeral and the gross, the details, the scratchings on a wall, the phrase of a passerby, the defects of a book, the pale sonata, the snoring of a beggar on a bench, the flowers on the wallpaper of a hotel room, the odor of cabbage on the stairway, the color of an electric bulb in a toilet, the fragment of a voice trailing in the night, the walk of a whore, the haunches of a bare-back rider in the circus. His analytical blue eyes devoured details, his mouth seemed open and ready to taste, his tongue flicked and the saliva came to his lips, his hands seemed ready to leap and to grasp, hands like the feathers of a bird all set to beat out into the air, a body all ready to leap, always alert, the whole substance of his body a sensitized sponge. Drinking, eating, absorbing, with a million cells of spongy substance. Every pore of his body sensitized, pregnable, saturated.
Lost, as it seemed, into the universes he explored, yet deep down, always ready to retire within himself with his prey, to nourish upon the substance alone, afterwards, in the great solitary feast of the creator, the greatest and the most solitary of banquets to which those who supplied the nourishment were never invited.
While he lay over me with his unabatable attentiveness I knew he was watching the alterations of my face, listening to the cries I uttered, and the final deeper, savage tones. I closed my eyes before this watchfulness of his and sank into a blind, moist drunkenness. I felt myself caught in the immense jaws of his desire, felt myself dissolving, ripping open to his descent. I felt myself yielding up to his dark hunger. An immense jaw closing upon my feelings, my feelings smouldering, rising from me like smoke from a black mass. Take me, take me, take my gifts and my moods and my body, take all you want.
I am being fucked by a cannibal.
It is all that is human in me that he devours. He eats me as if my love for him were something he wanted to possess inside his body, at the very core of his body, like fuel. He eats me as if my faith in him were a food he needed for daily sustenance.
He is not concerned to know whether I can live or breathe within the dark cavern of his whale-like being, within the whale-belly of his ego.
I was surprised that when this cannibal had ended his feast there was left in its place a still greater richesse. It was his devouring appetite that produced this miracle: it restored to all things their taste, their savour. It aroused an equal hunger, a feverish quest for new adventures, new foods. It set the blood and the pulse of life throbbing. His hunger was contagious; it gave birth to hunger, and with the hunger the savour of all things was restored. His appetite made things alive. It seemed to stir the activity of the earth, to call out vigorous sprouting and growth, the bursting of seeds and the flowering of the earth’s driest crust. It was like water over a desert, the moisture of his sensual mouth, the moisture of his sensual desires.