The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [365]
“Don’t scream; it’s best if you don’t scream,” he murmured. He could hear that his voice was not firm, but what was making it tremble was not hesitation but desire. “I beg you not to scream.”
With the hand that had pulled the sheets back, through her nightdress buttoned all the way up to the neck, he now fondled Sebastiana’s breasts: they were large, well proportioned, extraordinarily firm for a woman who must be close to forty years old; he felt the nipples grow hard, shiver from the cold beneath his fingertips. He ran his fingers along the ridge of her nose, her lips, her eyebrows, with the most delicate touch of which he was capable, and finally sank them in the tangle of hair and gently wound her locks round them. Meanwhile, he tried to exorcise with a smile the tremendous fear he saw in the woman’s stunned, incredulous gaze.
“I should have done this a long time ago, Sebastiana,” he said, brushing her cheeks with his lips. “I should have done it the very first day I desired you. I would have been happier, Estela would have been happier, and perhaps you would have been, too.”
He brought his face down, his lips seeking the woman’s, but struggling to break the hold of fear and surprise that had paralyzed her, she moved away, and as he read the plea in her eyes he heard her stammer: “I beg you, in the name of what you love most, I implore you…The senhora, the senhora.”
“The senhora is there and I love her more than you,” he heard himself say, but had the sensation that it was someone else who was speaking, and still trying to think; he for his part was merely that body in heat, that member, completely roused now, that he felt bounding against his belly, erect and hard and wet. “I’m also doing this for her, although you may not be able to understand that.”
Fondling her breasts, he had found the buttons of her nightdress and was popping them out of their little buttonholes, one after the other, as with his other hand he took Sebastiana by the nape of the neck and forced her to turn her head and offer him her lips. He could feel that they were ice-cold and tightly pressed together, and noted that the servant’s teeth were chattering, that she was trembling all over, and that in the space of a few seconds she had become drenched with sweat.
“Open your mouth,” he ordered her, in a tone of voice that he had very seldom used in his life when speaking to servants, or to slaves when he had had them. “If I must force you to be docile, I shall do so.”
He felt the servant—conditioned, doubtless by a habit, a fear, or an instinct of self-preservation that had come down to her from the depths of time, along with a centuries-old tradition that his tone of voice had succeeded in reminding her of—obey him, as at the same time her face, in the blue shadow of the alcove, contorted in a grimace in which fear was mingled now with infinite repulsion. But this did not matter to him as he forced his tongue inside her mouth, met hers violently, pushed it back and forth from one side to the other, explored her gums, her palate, tried his best to introduce a little of his saliva into her mouth and then suck it back and swallow it. Meanwhile, he had gone on ripping the buttons from her nightdress and trying to remove it. But though Sebastiana’s spirit and her mouth had yielded to his will, her entire body continued to resist, despite her fear, or perhaps because an even greater fear than the one that had taught her to bow to the will of any person who had power over her made her defend what he was trying to take from