Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [54]
So now Pierre turned his attention to another kind of courtship. As soon as she entered he noted how she moved, how she took her coat and hat off, how she shook her hair, what rings she wore. He thought that from all these signs he could detect her mood. Then this mood became his ground for conquest. Today she was childlike, pliant, with her hair loose, her head bowing easily with the weight of all her life. She had on less make-up, an innocent expression, she wore a light dress of bright colors. Today he would caress her gently, with tenderness, observing the perfection of her toes, for instance, as free as the fingers of a hand; observing her ankles, on which pale-blue veins showed through; observing the little ink spot forever tattooed below her knee, where, when she was fifteen – a girl in school and wearing black stockings – she had covered a little hole in the stockings with ink. The pen point had broken during the process, wounding her and marking her skin for good. He would look for a broken fingernail so that he might deplore its loss, its pathetic truncated look among her other long, pointed ones. He worried over all her little miseries. He held close to him the little girl in her, whom he would have liked to know. He asked questions: ‘So you wore black cotton stockings?’
‘We were very poor, and it was also part of the school uniform.’
‘What else did you wear?’
‘Middy blouses and dark blue skirts, which I hated. I loved finery so.’
‘And underneath?’ he asked, with such innocence that he might have been asking whether she wore a raincoat in the rain.
‘I’m not sure what my underclothes were like then – I liked petticoats with frills on them, I remember. I’m afraid I was made to wear woolen underwear. And in the summer, white slips and bloomers. I did not like the bloomers. They were too full. I dreamed of lace then, and gazed by the hour at the underwear in shop windows, entranced, imagining myself in satin and lace. You would have found nothing entrancing about a little girl’s underwear.’
But Pierre thought yes, that no matter if it were white and perhaps shapeless, he could imagine himself very much in love with Elena in her black stockings.
He wanted to know when she had experienced her first sensual tremor. It was while reading, said Elena, and then while coasting on a sled with a boy lying full length over her, and then when she fell in love with men she only knew at a distance, for as soon as they came near her, she discovered some defect that estranged her. She needed strangers, a man seen at a window, a man seen once a day in the street, a man she had seen once in a concert hall. After such encounters, Elena let her hair fall wild, was negligent in her dress, slightly wrinkled, and sat like some Chinese woman concerned with small events and delicate sadnesses.
Then, lying at her side, holding only her hand, Pierre talked about his life, offering her images of himself as a boy, to match those of the little girl she brought him. It was as if in each the older shells of their mature personalities had dissolved, like some added structure, a superimposition, revealing the cores.
As a child, Elena had been what she had suddenly become again for him – an actress, a simulator, someone who lived in her fantasies and roles and never knew what she truly felt.
Pierre had been a rebel. He had been raised among women, without his father, who had died at sea. The woman who mothered him was his nurse, and his mother lived only to find a replacement for the man she had lost. There was no motherhood in her. She was a born mistress. She treated her son