Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [32]
But from that moment Lilith was haunted by the idea that there might be ways of arousing herself artificially. She tried all the formulas she had heard about. She tried drinking big cups of chocolate with a great deal of vanilla in it. She tried eating onions. Alcohol did not affect her as it affected other people, because she was on her guard against it from the first. She could not forget herself.
She had heard about small balls that were used as an aphrodisiac in the East Indies. But how to obtain them? Where to ask for them? East Indian women inserted them inside the vagina. They were made of some very soft rubber with a soft, skinlike surface. When they were introduced into the sex they molded themselves to the form of it and then they moved as the woman moved, sensitively shaping themselves to every motion of the muscles, causing a titillation much more exciting than that of the penis or finger. Lilith would have liked to find one, and to keep it inside of herself day and night.
Marianne
I shall call myself the madam of a house of literary prostitution, the madam for a group of hungry writers who were turning out erotica for sale to a ‘collector’. I was the first to write, and every day I gave my work to a young woman to type up neatly.
This young woman, Marianne, was a painter, and in the evenings she typed to earn a living. She had a golden halo of hair, blue eyes, a round face, and firm and full breasts, but she tended to conceal the richness of her body rather than set it off, to disguise it under formless Bohemian clothes, loose jackets, school-girl skirts, raincoats. She came from a small town. She had read Proust, Krafft-Ebing, Marx, Freud.
And, of course, she had had many sexual adventures, but there is a kind of adventure in which the body does not really participate. She was deceiving herself. She thought that, having lain down with men, caressed them, and made all the prescribed gestures, she had experienced sexual life.
But it was all external. Actually her body had been numb, unformed, not yet matured. Nothing had touched her very deeply. She was still a virgin. I could feel this when she entered the room. No more than a soldier wants to admit being frightened, did Marianne want to admit that she was cold, frigid. But she was being psychoanalyzed.
I could not help wondering, as I gave her my erotica to type, how it would affect her. Together with an intellectual fearlessness, curiosity, there was in her a physical prudishness which she fought hard not to betray, and it had been revealed to me accidentally by the discovery that she had never taken a sun bath naked, that the very idea of it intimidated her.
What she remembered most hauntingly was an evening with a man she had not at first responded to, and then, just as he was leaving her studio, he had pressed her hard against a wall, lifted one of her legs, and pushed into her. The strange part is that at the time she had not felt anything, but afterwards, every time she remembered this picture, she grew hot and restless. Her legs would relax, she would have given anything to feel again that big body pressing against her, pinning her to the wall, leaving her no escape, then taking her.
One day she was late in bringing me the work. I went to her studio and knocked on the door. No one answered. I pushed the door open. Marianne must have gone out on an errand.
I went to the typewriter to see how the work was going and saw a text I did not recognize. I thought perhaps I was beginning to forget what I wrote. But it could not be. That was not my writing. I began to read. And then I understood.
In the middle of her work, Marianne had been taken with the desire to write down her own experiences. This is what she wrote:
‘There are things one reads that make you aware that you have lived nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing up to that time. I see now that most of