The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [45]
Of course, if he could feel that this regularization offered some guarantee for life, then there was still room for compromise. But what about reality? The thorn of death falls from heaven, and its myriad forms leave us no room to move. In sex, too, one seems to have a vague premonition, a feeling that one has been left with a false promissory note. And so one begins to falsify the commutation ticket because one is sexually unsatisfied. Well, that’s all right; it’s good business. Or one admits of spiritual rape as a necessary evil. Anyway, without it there would be almost no marriages. Those who are in favor of free sex behave in much the same way. They are only giving a plausible rationalization to mutual rape. If you accept it as such, it can be enjoyed too. Freedom combined with constant worry—like a curtain that does not quite close—can only result in sexual psychopaths. There was no opportunity for his pitiable sex to doff its hat and relax.
The woman seemed to sense the workings of the man’s emotions. She stopped in the midst of tying the string to her trousers, and the end of the loosened thong hung down from between her hands. She looked up at him with rabbit-like eyes. And it was not only because of their red eyelids that they resembled a rabbit’s. The man answered her with eyes in which time had ceased to run. A strong smell like boiled gristle surrounded her.
Still grasping the thong, she slipped by him and went up to her room, where she began to take off her trousers. Her manner was so completely natural that she seemed to be continuing what she had been doing before. The man inwardly rubbed his hands in expectation: such a woman was a real woman. But he immediately reconsidered. Stupid! With such hesitancy he would surely botch the thing. Hastily he too put his hand to his belt. If this had been yesterday he would have perhaps assumed her behavior to be a woman’s transparent play-acting … like her giggles and dimples. Actually that might be the case. But he did not want to think so. The stage at which he could bargain for her body had long passed. Now, force had decided the situation. There was ample basis for thinking that relations would be mutually agreeable, and bargaining for permission could be dismissed.
A little flow of sand, along with his trousers, slid over the base of his member and fell along his thighs. A stench like that of musty socks rose up. Slowly, but surely, with a pumping like that of a water pipe in which the water has been turned off, his member began to fill again. Hatless, his penis indicating the direction, he spread his wings and melted in behind the already naked woman.
Would he find it enjoyable? Of course everything fitted, as if into a square of equally spaced graph paper: breathing, time, the room, the woman. Was this what the Möbius man called general sexual desire? Maybe, but what tight buttocks! You couldn’t compare them to the frustrated bags of bones you picked up in the streets.
The woman, sitting on one knee, had begun to brush the sand from her neck with a towel which she had rolled into a ball. Suddenly there was an avalanche of sand. The whole house trembled and groaned. A provoking interference! Before his very eyes, a mistlike sand covered the woman’s head with white, collecting on her shoulders and arms. The two, clutched in each other’s arms, could only wait for the avalanche to pass.
Their sweat trickled onto the sand which had gathered, and on that still more sand fell. The woman’s shoulders trembled. He felt like superheated water, as if he were on the verge of boiling over. Yet he could not understand why he was so terribly attracted by her thighs. But he was … so much that he felt like taking the nerves of his body and coiling them one by one around them. The appetite of meat-eating animals must be just this—coarse, voracious. He fought back like a coiled spring. This was an experience he had not had with the other.