Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [61]
But she saw in his eyes that she had already hurt him. He walked stubbornly beside her, almost to the very door of Pierre’s apartment house.
She found him with a ravaged face. He had seen them in the street, had followed them from the little café. He had watched every gesture and expression that had passed between them. He said, ‘There were quite a few emotional gestures between you.’
He was like a wild animal, his hair falling over his forehead, his eyes haggard. For an hour he was dark, beside himself with anger and doubt. She pleaded, pleaded with love, took his head and laid it on her breast, lulling him. Out of sheer exhaustion he fell asleep. She then slid out of the bed and stood by his window. The charm of the sculptor had faded. Everything faded beside the depth of Pierre’s jealousy. She thought of Pierre’s flesh, his flavor, the love they had, and at the same time she heard Jean’s adolescent laughter, trusting, sensitive, and she saw the potent charm of Leila.
She was afraid. She was afraid because she was no longer securely tied to Pierre but to an unknown woman lying down, yielding, open, spreading.
Pierre awakened. He stretched out his arms and said, ‘It is over now.’
Then she wept. She wanted to beg him to keep her imprisoned, to let no one lure her away. They kissed passionately. He answered her desire by locking her in his arms with such a force that her bones cracked. She laughed and said, ‘You’re suffocating me.’ She lay dissolved, then, by a maternal feeling, a feeling that she wanted to protect him from pain; he, on the other hand, seemed. to feel he could possess her once and for all. His jealousy incited him to a kind of fury. The sap rose in him with such vigor that he did not wait for her pleasure. And she did not want this pleasure. She felt herself as a mother receiving a child into herself, drawing him in to lull him, to protect him. She felt no sexual urge but the urge to open, to receive, to enfold only.
On days when she found Pierre weak, passive, uncertain, his body lax, eluding even the effort of dressing, of walking out into the street, then she felt herself incisive, active. She had strange feelings when they fell asleep together. In sleep he seemed vulnerable. She felt her strength aroused. She wanted then to enter him, like a man, take possession of him. She wanted to penetrate him with knifelike thrusts. She lay between sleep and wakefulness, identified with his virility, imagined herself becoming him and taking him as he took her.
And then, at other times, she fell back, became herself – sea and sand and moisture, and no embrace then seemed violent enough, brutal enough, bestial enough.
But if after Pierre’s jealousy their lovemaking was more violent, at the same time the air was dense; their feelings were in tumult; there was hostility, confusion, pain. Elena did not know whether their love had grown a root or absorbed a poison that would hasten its decay.
Was there an obscure joy in this that she missed, as she missed so many morbid, masochistic tastes other people had for defeat, misery, poverty, humiliation, entanglements, failures? Pierre had said once, ‘What I remember most are the great pains of my life. The pleasant moments I have forgotten.’
Then Kay came to see Elena, a newborn Kay, glittering. Her air of living among many lovers was finally a reality. She had come to tell Elena how she had balanced her life between her hasty lover and a woman. They sat on Elena’s bed, smoking, talking.
Kay said, ‘You know the woman. It’s Leila.’
Elena could not help thinking: So Leila loves a little woman again. Will she never love an equal? Someone as strong as she? She was wounded with jealousy. She wanted to be in Kay’s place being loved by Leila.
She asked, ‘What is it like to be loved by Leila?’
‘It’s incredibly marvelous, Elena. Something incredible. In the first place, she always knows what one wants, what mood I’m in, what I desire. She is always accurate. She looks at