Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [47]
Again she sensed his remoteness, the distance between them. He would not even take her arm, shining brown in the Parisian summer sun. He admired all she wore, her rings, her tinkling bracelets, her dress, her sandals, but without touching her.
Miguel was being analyzed by a famous French doctor. Every time he moved, loved, took someone, it seemed the knots of his life drew closer around his throat. He wanted liberation, liberation to live out his abnormality. This he did not have. Each time he loved a boy, he did so with a sense of crime. The aftermath was guilt. And then he sought to atone with suffering.
Now he could talk about it, and he opened his whole life before Elena, without shame. It caused her no pain. It relieved her doubts about herself. Because he did not understand his nature, he had at first blamed her, put on her the burden of his frigidity toward woman. He said it was because she was intelligent, and intelligent women mixed literature and poetry with love, which paralyzed him; and that she was positive, masculine, in some of her ways, and this intimidated him. She was so young at the time, she had readily accepted this and come to believe that slender, intellectual, positive women could not be desired.
He would say: ‘If only you were very passive, very obedient, very very inert, I might desire you. But I always feel in you a volcano about to explode, a volcano of passion, and that frightens me.’ Or: ‘If you were just a whore, and I could feel that you would not be too exacting, too critical, I might desire you. But I would feel your clever head watching me and looking down on me if I failed, if, for instance, I were suddenly impotent.’
Poor Elena, for years she completely overlooked the men who desired her. Because Miguel was the one she had wanted to seduce, it seemed to her that only Miguel could have proved her power.
Miguel, in his need of someone other than his analyst to confide in, introduced Elena to his lover, Donald. As soon as Elena saw Donald she loved him too, as she would a child, an enfant terrible, perverse and knowing.
He was beautiful. He had a slender Egyptian body, wild hair like that of a child who had been running. At times the softness of his gestures made him seem small, but when he stood up, stylized, pure in line, stretched, then he seemed tall. His eyes were in a trance, and he talked flowingly, like a medium.
Elena was so enchanted with him that she began to enjoy subtly and mysteriously Miguel’s making love to him – for her. Donald as a woman, being made love to by Miguel, courting his youthful charm, his sweeping eyelashes, his small, straight nose, his faun ears, his strong, boyish hands.
She recognized in Donald a twin brother who used her words, her coquetries, her artifices. He was obsessed with the same words and feelings that obsessed her. He talked continually about his desire to be consumed in love, about his desire for renunciation and for protection of others. She could hear her own voice. Was Miguel aware that he was making love to a twin brother of Elena, to Elena in a boy’s body?
When Miguel left them at the café table for a moment, they looked at each other with a stare of recognition. Without Miguel, Donald was no longer a woman. He straightened his body, looked at her unflinchingly, and talked about how he was seeking intensity and tension saying that Miguel was not the father he needed -Miguel was too young, Miguel was just another child. Miguel wanted to offer him a paradise somewhere, a beach where they could make love freely, embrace day and night, a paradise of caresses and lovemaking; but he, Donald, sought something else. He liked the infernos of love, love mixed with great sufferings and great obstacles. He wanted to kill monsters and overcome enemies and struggle like some Don Quixote.
As he talked about Miguel, there came to his face the same expression women have when they have seduced a man, an expression of vain satisfaction. A triumphant, uncontrollable