Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [13]
‘Oh, you’re here,’ said Antonio rather irritably.
‘I had nowhere to go.’
‘You can’t stay here you know. The police are after you.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I suppose you’re the one who stole that cocaine the other day? I knew it must be you.’
‘Yes,’ the man talked sleepily, indifferently.
Then Mathilde saw that his body was covered with scratches and small wounds. The man made an effort to sit up. He held an ampoule in one hand, in the other hand, a fountain pen and a penknife.
She watched him with horror.
He broke the top of the ampoule with his finger, shaking off the broken bits. Then, instead of inserting a hypodermic syringe, he inserted the fountain pen and drew the liquid out. With his penknife he made a slit in his arm that was already covered with old wounds and more recent ones, and in this slit he inserted the fountain pen and pushed the cocaine into his flesh.
‘He’s too poor to get an injection needle,’ said Antonio. ‘And I did not give money to him because I thought I could save him from stealing it. But that’s what he has found to do.’
Mathilde wanted to go. But Antonio would not let her. He wanted her to take cocaine with him. The man was lying back with his eyes closed. Antonio took out a needle and gave Mathilde an injection.
They lay on the floor and she was taken with an overpowering numbness. Antonio said to her, ‘You feel dead, don’t you?’ It was as if she had been given ether. His voice seemed to come from so far. She motioned to him that she felt as if she were fainting. He said, ‘It will pass.’
There began a nightmarish dream. Far away there was the figure of the prostrate man, lying back on the mat, then the figure of Antonio, very large and black. Antonio took the penknife and bent over Mathilde. She felt his penis inside of her, and it was soft and pleasurable, she moved in a slow, relaxed, wavering gesture. The penis was taken out. She felt it swinging out over the silky moisture between her legs, but she had not been satisfied and she was making a gesture as if to retrieve it. Next in the nightmare Antonio held the penknife open and he bent over her parted legs, and he touched her with the tip of it, pushed it slightly in. Mathilde felt no pain, no energy to move, she was hypnotized by this open knife. Then she became wildly conscious of what was happening – that it was not a nightmare. Antonio was watching the penknife tip touching the entrance of her sex. She screamed. The door opened. It was the police, who had come to fetch the cocaine thief.
Mathilde was rescued from the man who had so often slashed at the sexual opening of the whores, and who for this reason would never touch his mistress there. He had been safe only when he lived with her, when the provocativeness of her breasts kept his attention diverted from the sex, the morbid attraction to what he called ‘woman’s little wound’, which he was so violently tempted to enlarge.
The Boarding School
This is a story of life in Brazil many years ago, far from the city, where the customs of strict Catholicism still prevailed. Boys of good birth were sent to boarding schools run by the Jesuits, who continued the severe habits of the Middle Ages. The boys slept on beds of wood, rose at dawn, attended mass without breakfast, confessed every day and were constantly watched and spied upon. The atmosphere was austere and inhibiting. The priests ate their meals apart and created an aura of sainthood around themselves. They were stylized in their gestures and speech.
Among them was a very dark-skinned Jesuit who had some Indian blood, the face of a satyr, large ears glued to his head, piercing eyes, a loose-lipped mouth that was always watering, thick hair and the smell of an animal. Under his long brown robe the boys had often noticed a bulge which the younger boys could not explain and which older boys laughed at behind his