Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [121]
‘Then I went out, got wine and cold meat and back to bed again. No daylight. We did not know what time of day it was, or whether it was night. We just lay there, feeling with our bodies, one inside of the other almost continuously, talking into each other’s ears. Yvonne would say something to make me laugh. I would say, “Yvonne, don’t make me laugh so much or it will slip out.” My penis would slip out of her when I laughed and I would have to put it back again.
‘“Yvonne, are you tired of this?” I asked.
‘“Ah, no,” said Yvonne, “it is the only time I have ever enjoyed myself. When clients are always in a sort of hurry, you know, it sort of hurts my feelings, so I let them go at it, but I don’t take any interest in it. Besides, it’s bad for business. It makes you old and tired too quickly if you do. And I always have that feeling that they don’t pay enough attention to me, so it makes me draw in, away from them somewhere in myself. You understand that?”’
Then Marcel asked me if he had been a good lover that first time in his place.
‘You were a good lover, Marcel. I liked the way you gripped my ass with both hands. You gripped it firmly as if you were going to eat into it. I liked the way you took my sex between your two hands. It was the way you took it, so decisively, with so much maleness. It is a little touch of the caveman you have.’
‘Why do women never tell men this? Why do women make such a secret and mystery of it all? They think it destroys their mystery, but it is not true. And here you come out and say just what you felt. It is wonderful.’
‘I believe in saying it. There are enough mysteries, and these do not help our enjoyment of each other. Now the war is here and many people will die, knowing nothing because they are tongue-tied about sex. It’s ridiculous.’
‘I am remembering St Tropez,’ said Marcel. ‘The most wonderful summer we have ever had …’
As he said this, I saw the place vividly. An artists’ colony where society people and actors and actresses went, people with yachts anchored there. The little cafés on the waterfront, the gaiety, the exuberance, the laxity. Everybody in beach costumes. Everybody fraternizing – the yacht people with the artists, the artists with the young postman, the young policeman, the young fisherman, young and dark men of the south.
There was dancing on a patio under the sky. The jazz band came from Martinique and was hotter than the summer night. Marcel and I were sitting in a corner one evening when they announced that they would put all the lights out for five minutes, then for ten, then for fifteen in the middle of each dance.
A man called out, ‘Choose your partners carefully for the quart d’heure de passion. Choose your partners carefully.’
There was a great flurry and bustle for a moment. Then the dance began, and eventually the lights went out. A few women screamed hysterically. A man’s voice said, ‘That’s an outrage, I won’t stand for it.’ Someone else screamed, ‘Turn on the lights.’
The dance continued in the dark. One felt that bodies were in heat.
Marcel was in ecstasy, holding me as if he would break me, bending over me, his knees between mine, his penis erect. In five minutes people only had time to get a little friction. When the lights went on everybody looked disturbed. A few faces looked apoplectic, others pale. Marcel’s hair was tousled. One woman’s linen shorts were wrinkled. One man’s linen trousers were wrinkled. The atmosphere was sultry, animal, electric. At the same time there was a surface of refinement to be maintained, a form, an elegance. Some people, who were shocked, were leaving. Some waited as if for a storm. Others waited with a light in their eyes.
‘Do you think one of them will scream, turn into a beast,