The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [42]
The woman, facing the other way in a corner of the room, was doing something with the front of her kimono. Perhaps she was unloosening her waistband or brushing off the sand which had accumulated. He grasped the shovel halfway down the handle and brought it up to the level of his shoulders. Aiming at the wall that surrounded the earthen floor, near the doorway, he heaved to with the cutting edge.
The woman cried out behind him. He lunged with the shovel, bearing on it with all his weight. Disappointingly, it passed through the wall boards. They had the resistance of a wet cracker. Washed by the sand, they had seemed quite new from the outside, but it was apparent they had already begun to disintegrate.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m stripping this stuff off to make some material for a ladder.”
He experimented again at another spot. It was the same. Apparently the woman had been right when she said that the sand rotted the wood. If the part of the wall that was most exposed to the sun was like this, he could imagine what the rest would be like. It was remarkable that such a flabby house could be standing at all. It was bent and warped as if paralyzed on one side. Maybe such flimsy structures were dynamically possible, since they seemed to be making houses out of plastic and paper these days, but …
If that was the way it was with the boards, then he would try the cross-beams.
“You can’t do that! Stop! Please!”
“After all, we’re going to be crushed by the sand anyway.”
Without paying any attention, he poised his arm to strike, but the woman, screaming, rushed violently at him. He put out his elbow and twisted his body in an effort to ward her off. But he had miscalculated, and instead of the woman he himself was swung around. Instantly he tried to counter, but she held on as if chained to the shovel. He did not understand. At least he could not be defeated by force. They rolled over two or three times, threshing about on the earthen floor, and for a brief moment he thought he had pinned her down, but with the handle of the shovel as a shield she deftly flipped him over. Something was wrong with him; maybe it was the saké he had drunk. Anyway, he no longer cared that his opponent was a woman. He jabbed his bended knee into her stomach.
The woman cried out, and suddenly her strength ebbed. At once he rolled over on her and held her down. Her breasts were bare, and his hands slipped on skin that was slippery with sweat.
Suddenly the two of them froze, as in a movie when the projector breaks down. It was a petrified moment that would go on and on, if one of them did not do something. He could sense vividly the structure of her breasts outlined against his stomach, and his penis seemed like a living thing completely independent of him. He held his breath. With a slight turn of his body the scramble for the shovel would turn into something very different.
The woman’s gorge rose as she tried to swallow the saliva in her mouth. His penis received this as a signal to stir, but she interrupted in a husky voice.
“City women are all pretty, aren’t they?”
“City women?” He was suddenly ashamed. The fever in his swollen member was abating. They seemed to have skirted the danger with good grace. He had not realized that soap opera could survive even in the midst of sand.
Yet the average woman was firmly convinced, it seemed, that she could not make a man recognize her worth unless every time she opened her legs she did so as if it were a scene in a soap opera. But this very pathetic and innocent illusion in fact made women the victims of a one-sided, spiritual rape.
With his other woman, he had decided he would always use a condom. Even now he was not convinced that he had been completely cured of the venereal disease he had once had. The results of the tests always came out negative, but after urinating his urethra would suddenly begin to hurt, and when he checked a sample in a test tube, there would be, just as he had feared, something floating