The Kill - Emile Zola [103]
Had they closed their eyes, had the suffocating heat and pale light not been enough to plunge them into depravity of all the senses, the odors would have sufficed to rouse their nerves to an extraordinary degree of irritability. The pool enveloped them in a deep, pungent aroma compounded of the smells of a thousand blossoms and leaves. At times the vanilla cooed like wood pigeons. Then the stanhopea chimed in with harsh notes from their striped throats, whose exhalations were marked by a strong and bitter smell of convalescence. The orchids, in baskets suspended from small chains, were like living censers breathing out their distinctive scents. But the dominant odor, the odor responsible for all the muffled sighs, was a human odor, an odor of love, which Maxime recognized when he kissed the back of Renée’s neck and buried his head in her undone tresses. They were still intoxicated by that odor of amorous womanhood, which hung about the air of the conservatory as though this were the alcove where the earth gave birth.
Usually the lovers lay down beneath the tanghin from Madagascar, the poisonous shrub whose leaf Renée had bitten into. All around them, white statues laughed at the sight of such quantities of greenery engaged in the act of love. The moon, as it revolved, moved groups of plants about and animated the drama with its changing light. And they were a thousand leagues from Paris, far from the facile life of the Bois and official receptions, somewhere in the jungles of India or in some monstrous temple, where the black marble sphinx was god. They were aware of tumbling helplessly into crime, forbidden love, and bestial caresses. All the lushness that surrounded them, all the hidden tangle of the pool, all the naked shamelessness of the greenery plunged them into a Dantean inferno of passion. Then it was, in the depths of this glass cage seething with summer heat astray in that clear December chill, that they tasted incest, the criminal fruit of that overheated patch of earth, that terrifying bed that filled their hearts with unspoken fear.
Renée’s body seemed whiter as she crouched in the center of that black bearskin like a huge cat, its back arched and paws tense beneath supple, sinewy hocks. She was completely swollen with sensuality, and the clean outline of her shoulders and waist stood out with feline sharpness against the ink spot the black fur left on the yellow sand of the path. She eyed Maxime, her prey, lying on his back beneath her in a posture of utter surrender, completely in her possession. At intervals she would lean forward suddenly and kiss him with aching lips—lips that parted at those moments with the eager, sanguinary splendor of the Chinese hibiscus that covered the side of the house. In those instants she was nothing but a fiery child of the conservatory. Her kisses bloomed and faded like the red flowers of the great mallow, which last only a few hours and are continually reborn—the bruised, insatiable lips of a gigantic Messalina.
5
The kiss he had planted on his wife’s neck preoccupied Saccard. He had long since ceased to avail himself of his marital prerogatives. The rupture had come about naturally, as neither