Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [46]
But she, as she danced with him, had become aware of her body, as if it had suddenly turned to flesh – ignited flesh, into which each motion of the dance threw a flame. She wanted to fall forward into the flesh of his mouth, abandon herself to a mysterious drunkenness.
Miguel’s drunkenness was of another kind. He behaved as if seduced by an unreal creature, a fantasy. His body was dead to hers. The nearer he moved to her, the stronger he felt this taboo surrounding her, and he stood as if he were before a sacred image. As soon as he entered her presence, what he succumbed to was a kind of castration.
As her body warmed to his nearness, he found nothing to say but her name: ‘Elena!’ At this, his arms and legs and sex were so paralyzed that he stopped dancing. What he was aware of as he uttered her name was his mother, his mother as he had seen her when he was small; that is, a woman larger than other women, immense, abundant, with the curves of her maternity overflowing from her loose white clothes, the breasts from which he had nourished himself and which he had clung to past the age of necessity, until the time when he was becoming conscious of the full dark mystery of flesh.
So each time he saw the breasts of big, full women who resembled his mother, he experienced the desire to suckle, to chew, to bite and even hurt them, to press them against his face, to suffocate under their bursting fullness, to fill his mouth with the nipples, but he felt no desire to possess with sexual penetration.
Now Elena, when he first met her, had the tiny breasts of a girl of fifteen, which aroused in Miguel a certain contempt. She had none of the erotic attributes of his mother. He was never tempted to undress her. He never pictured her as a woman. She was an image, like the images of saints on little cards, the images of heroic women in books, the paintings of women.
Only whores possessed sexual organs. Miguel had seen such women very early when his older brothers had dragged him to the whorehouses. While his brothers took the women, he caressed their breasts. He filled his mouth with them, hungrily. But he was frightened by what he saw between their legs. To him it looked like a huge, wet, hungry mouth. He felt that he could never satisfy it. He was frightened by the luring crevice, the lips rigid under the stroking finger, the liquid that came like the saliva of a hungry person. He imagined this hunger of women as tremendous, ravenous, insatiable. It seemed to him that his penis would be swallowed forever. The whores he happened to see had big sexes, big, leathery sex lips, big buttocks.
What was there left for Miguel to turn to with his desires? Boys, boys without the gluttonous openings, boys with sexes like his, that did not frighten him, whose desires he could satisfy.
So on the very evening that Elena experienced this dart of desire and warmth in her body, Miguel had discovered the intermediate solution, a boy who aroused him without taboos, fears and doubts.
Elena, completely innocent of the love between boys, went home and sobbed all night because of Miguel’s remoteness. She had never been more beautiful; she felt his love, his worship. Then why did he not touch her? The dance had brought them together, but he was not inflamed. What did this mean? What mystery was this? Why was he jealous when others approached her? Why had he watched the other boys who were so eager to dance with her? Why did he not touch even her hand?
Yet he haunted her, and was haunted by her. Her image predominated over all women. His poetry was for her, his creations, his inventions, his soul. The sexual act alone took place away from her. How much suffering would have been spared her had she known, understood. She was too delicate to overtly question him, and he too ashamed to reveal himself.
And now Miguel was here, with his past life known to all, a long train of love affairs with boys, never lasting. He was