Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [63]
Then Leila came in, saw Elena and came to their table. She knew Miguel and Donald. She loved Donald’s peacock travesties – the spreading of imaginary colors, plumes one did not possess; without the colored hair, colored eyelashes, colored nails, that women had. She laughed with Donald, admired Miguel’s grace, then turned to Elena and plunged her dark eyes into Elena’s very green ones.
‘How is Pierre? Why don’t you bring him to the studio some time? I go there every evening before I sing. You never have come to hear me sing. I am at the nightclub every night about eleven.’
Later she offered: ‘Will you let me drive you where you are going?’
They left together and got into the back seat of Leila’s black limousine. Leila leaned over Elena and covered her mouth with her own full lips in one interminable kiss in which Elena nearly lost consciousness. Their hats fell off as they threw their heads back against the seats. Leila engulfed her. Elena’s mouth fell on Leila’s throat, in the slit of her black dress, which was open between the breasts. She only had to push the silk away with her mouth to feel the beginning of the breasts.
‘Are you going to elude me again?’ asked Leila.
Elena pressed her fingers against the silk-covered hips, feeling the richness of the hips, the fullness of the thighs, caressing her. The tantalizing smoothness of the skin and the silk of the dress melted into one another. She felt the little prominence of the garter. She wanted to push open Leila’s knees, right there. Leila gave an order to the chauffeur Elena did not hear. The car changed direction. ‘This is an abduction,’ said Leila, laughing deeply.
Hatless, hair flying, they entered her darkened apartment, where the blinds were drawn against the summer heat. Leila led Elena by the hand to her bedroom and they fell on the luxuriant bed together. Silk again, silk under the fingers, silk between the legs, silky shoulders, neck, hair. Lips of silk trembling under the fingers. It was like the night at the opium den; the caresses lengthened, the suspense was preciously sustained. Each time they approached the orgasm, either Leila or Elena, observing the quickening of the motion, took up the kissing again – a bath of lovemaking, such as one might have in an endless dream, the moisture creating little sounds of rain between the kisses. Leila’s finger was firm, commanding, like a penis; her tongue, far-reaching, knowing so many nooks where it stirred the nerves.
Instead of having one sexual core, Elena’s body seemed to have a million sexual openings, equally sensitized, every cell of the skin magnified with the sensibility of a mouth. The very flesh of her arm suddenly opened and contracted with the passage of Leila’s tongue or fingers. She moaned, and Leila bit into the flesh, as if to arouse a greater moan. Her tongue between Elena’s legs was like a stabbing, agile and sharp. When the orgasm came, it was so vibrant that it shook their bodies from head to foot.
Elena dreamed of Pierre and Bijou. The full-fleshed Bijou, the whore, the animal, the lioness; a luxuriant goddess of abundance, her flesh a bed of sensuality – every pore and curve of her. In the dream her hands were grasping, her flesh throbbed in a mountainous, heaving way, fermenting, saturated with moisture, folded into many voluptuous layers. Bijou was always prone, inert, awakening only for the moment of love. All the fluids of desire seeping along the silver shadows of her legs, around the violin-shaped hips, descending and ascending with a sound of wet silk around the hollows of her breasts.
Elena imagined her everywhere, in the tight skirt of the streetwalker, always preying and waiting. Pierre had loved her obscene walk, her naïve glance, her drunken sullenness, her virginal voice. For a few nights he had loved that walking sex, that ambulant womb, open to all.
And now perhaps he loved her again.
Pierre showed Elena a photograph of his mother, the luxuriant mother. The resemblance to Bijou