Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [111]
No one is there but an aviary full of canaries, who chirp and chirp as we make love, as if they, too, are pleased.
The lovemaking demolishes the boundaries between us; we become one person. He enters into me very small at first, keeps saying, “Apri, apri” (open up, open up), as if the whole of his need were to possess me, fill me, let me know him entirely.
Sex, when it is like that, is not sex anymore but a communion, a bridging of separateness, an abolition of bodies. And it is so rare, and so astounding. You can search for it forever and never find it.
(Sane mind: You found it before, and you’ll find it again.
Leila: Could you please shut up? I’m trying to con myself into falling in love!)
We sleep in a tangle of sweat and juice; awaken, make love again; sleep again; awaken again and make love.
“We were like an old couple, very much in love,” he says. And it is true. We knew each other wholly from the first touch. We make love as if on our twentieth anniversary, a homecoming, perfect fit.
With his ebony hair and his sea-green eyes, he looks like a giovanotto painted by Bronzino. He wears a black cord around his neck, the lion of Saint Mark and a Star of David on it. He’s an architect who designs important buildings in Italy, and he’s involved in some project to restore the ghetto of Venice. Something in him evokes all my womanliness and all my Jewishness—a powerful combination. There is about him a courtliness, a gentilezza, that makes me think of the Italian Renaissance. And yet there is also something slightly calculating about him—furbo, shrewd—that hints of the practiced Casanova. It is so hard to tell. Seized by the scruff of my neck and dragged again to The Land of Fuck, I find all judgment and all discrimination have fled.
(Sane mind: Help!)
I am deep into The Land of Fuck with Renzo—even though Julian is now here, staying with me at the Gritti. In the afternoons, I make some excuse—an interview, photographs, drinks with Venetian friends—and wait by the dock for Renzo to fetch me.
He comes on the very dot of two, as soon as he can get away, fracturing the sacred Italian lunch hour. Comes for me in the little motor launch—a classic Riva—putt, putt, putt—wearing white linen trousers and a blue linen jacket over a striped gondolier’s shirt, his body very slim and smelling of sweat and salt marsh, ovulation and the moon.
I step into the boat, which will carry me into the middle of the lagoon, and we sing vulgar American songs—“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” for one—as we putter off in the sunlight, drop anchor in the middle of the lagoon, where, in view of seagulls and low-flying planes, we make love in the boat, Venice suddenly nearly collapsed into the horizon line—low and insignificant, with its hordes of Michelin-carrying tourists, its skeletal socialites assembled for the Viva Venezia Ball, its gouging headwaiters, its hotelkeepers, shopkeepers, restaurant keepers, and its cruising gays, who now all practice “safe sex,” whatever that is.
Renzo and I do not practice safe sex. In The Land of Fuck, nothing is safe. We are lost in a watery Atlantis in the middle of the lagoon, where we communicate with cock and cunt, speaking, when we speak, only the most rudimentary English and troglodyte Italian.
The lack of language defeats us yet also makes everything more intense. Renzo claims to speak English like a Zulu. And my Italian, after all these years, is suitable only for survival on a desert island, photographed by Lina Wertmüller.
I call him Carissimo Troglodita (or Beloved Trog). He calls me Piccola Pittrice (or Little Painter). I would not accept the adjective from anyone else, but coming from him, it sounds like a compliment. He fucks me at every angle until I weep tears of joy. The tip of his cock also weeps when it emerges from his pants. He wears no underwear.
(Sane mind: Your mother warned you about men like that.)
“Piange per te,” he says. It cries for you.
He is trying to knock me up. Oh, how lovely Mediterranean men are in their understanding