Still grasping the thong, she slipped by him and went up to her room, where she began to take off her trousers. Her manner was so completely natural that she seemed to be continuing what she had been doing before. The man inwardly rubbed his hands in expectation: such a woman was a real woman. But he immediately reconsidered. Stupid! With such hesitancy he would surely botch the thing. Hastily he too put his hand to his belt. If this had been yesterday he would have perhaps assumed her behavior to be a woman's transparent play-acting… like her giggles and dimples. Actually that might be the case. But he did not want to think so. The stage at which he could bargain for her body had long passed. Now, force had decided the situation. There was ample basis for thinking that relations would be mutually agreeable, and bargaining for permission could be dismissed.
A little flow of sand, along with his trousers, slid over the base of his member and fell along his thighs. A stench like that of musty socles rose up. Slowly, but surely, with a pumping like that of a water pipe in which the water has been turned off, his member began to fill again. Hatless, his penis indicating the direction, he spread his wings and melted in behind the already naked woman.
Would he find it enjoyable? Of course everything fitted, as if into a square of equally spaced graph paper: breathing, time, the room, the woman. Was this what the Mobius man called general sexual desire? Maybe, but what tight buttocks! You couldn't compare them to the frustrated bags of bones you picked up in the streets.
The woman, sitting on one knee, had begun to brush the sand from her neck with a towel which she had rolled into a ball. Suddenly there was an avalanche of sand. The whole house trembled and groaned. A provoking interference! Before his very eyes, a mistlike sand covered the woman's head with white, collecting on her shoulders and arms. The two, clutched in each other's arms, could only wait for the avalanche to pass.
Their sweat trickled onto the sand which had gathered, and on that still more sand fell. The woman's shoulders trembled. He felt like superheated water, as if he were on the verge of boiling over. Yet he could not understand why he was so terribly attracted by her thighs. But he was… so much that he felt like taking the nerves of his body and coiling them one by one around them. The appetite of meat-eating animals must be just this — coarse, voracious. He fought back like a coiled spring. This was an experience he had not had with the other. On that bed — with the other one — they had been a feeling man and woman, a watching man and woman; they had been a man who watched himself experiencing and a woman who watched herself experiencing; they had been a woman who watched a man watching himself and a man watching a woman watching herself… all reflected in counter-mirrors… the limitless consciousness of the sexual act. Sexual desire, with a history of some hundred million years from the amoeba on up, is fortunately not easily worn out. But what he needed now was a voracious passion, a stimulation that would sweep his nerves into the woman's loins.
The sand avalanche stopped, and as though he had been waiting for it to do so, he joined the woman in helping to brush the sand from her body. She laughed in a husky voice. His hands became more and more insistent as they passed from her breasts under her arms and from there around her loins. Her fingers dug into his neck, and now and then she would give little cries of surprise.
When he had finished, it was her turn to brush his body. He closed his eyes and waited, passing his hand over her hair, which was hard and rough to the touch.
There was a spasmodic contraction, and again the same thing… the same changeless repetition to which he had devoted himself, dreaming of other things: eating, walking, sleeping, hiccoughing, bawling, copulating.
21
Man's convulsions go on building endless layers of fossils. Dinosaur teeth and glaciers were powerless against this reproductive drive with its screams and its ecstasy. Finally a white flash squeezed his writhing body dry… a meteoric swarm spurted out, piercing the limitless darkness… rusty, orange-colored stars… an alkaline chorus.
The glimmer trailed on and disappeared at last. The woman's hands patting him on the buttocks to urge him on no longer had any effect. His nerves, which had streamed into her, had withered back like a frost-bitten radish, and his member was paralyzed between the lips of the conch. The woman, who had thrust out her hips, reluctant to let him go, also sank back exhausted in a breathless contentment.
An old rag rankly sour behind a chest of drawers… an avenue in front of a bicycle track, from which he used to return covered with the dust of regret.
In the final analysis, nothing had been of any avail, nothing had been finished. It was not he who had satisfied his desires, but apparently someone quite different, someone who had borrowed his body. Sex, of its nature, was not defined by a single, individual body but by the species. An individual, finished with his squalid act, must return at once to his former self. Only the happy ones return to contentment Those who were sad return to despair. Those who were dying return to their deathbeds. How could he possibly be convinced that such trickery was passionate love? Was there anything better in this passionate love than in commutation sex? If there were, it would be better to be some ascetic made of glass. Apparently he had dozed off for a moment, rolling over in the sweat and secretions which smelled like rancid fish oil. He had dreamed. It was a dream about a lavatory which he could never find although he could hear the sound of water, about a common bathroom where the toilet was filled to overflowing with feces, about a long gallery whose flooring was beginning to warp, about a cracked glass. There was a man, running with a canteen. When he asked him for just a swallow of water, the man scowled at him, making a face like a grasshopper, and rushed off.
He awoke. A hot, sticky glue was melting on the back of his tongue. His thirst had returned twofold. He wanted water. Sparkling, crystalline water, with silver spurs of air bubbles rising from the bottom of the glass. He was an empty water pipe in a deserted house, covered with spider webs and smeared with dust, gasping like a fish.
When he stood up, his hands and feet felt like heavy rubber bags of water. He picked up the empty kettle, which had been thrown on the earthen floor, and tipped it to his mouth. After more than thirty seconds, two, three drops finally dampened the end of his tongue. But it remained as dry as blotting paper. His expectant throat convulsed even more, as if it had gone insane.
Frantic for water, he rummaged around in the vicinity of the sink for anything he could get his hands on. Of all chemical compounds water was the simplest one. It should not be impossible to find some somewhere… like a penny forgotten in a desk drawer. There! He smelled water. Without a doubt it was the smell of water. He hastily scraped some wet sand from the bottom of the water jar and stuffed his mouth full. A feeling of nausea welled up in him. He bent over, his stomach convulsed, and his tears began to flow as he vomited up a yellow gastric liquid.
The pain of his headache slipped down over his eyes like a leaden visor. Apparently passion was simply a short-cut to collapse. Suddenly he rose to his hands and knees, and like a dog began to dig in the sand of the earthen floor. When he had dug to the depth of his elbows, the sand was dark and moist. He thrust his face into it, pressed his burning forehead against it, inhaling it deeply. The oxygen and hydrogen might conceivably combine.