The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [46]
The sand avalanche stopped, and as though he had been waiting for it to do so, he joined the woman in helping to brush the sand from her body. She laughed in a husky voice. His hands became more and more insistent as they passed from her breasts under her arms and from there around her loins. Her fingers dug into his neck, and now and then she would give little cries of surprise.
When he had finished, it was her turn to brush his body. He closed his eyes and waited, passing his hand over her hair, which was hard and rough to the touch.
There was a spasmodic contraction, and again the same thing … the same changeless repetition to which he had devoted himself, dreaming of other things: eating, walking, sleeping, hiccoughing, bawling, copulating.
21
MAN’S convulsions go on building endless layers of fossils. Dinosaur teeth and glaciers were powerless against this reproductive drive with its screams and its ecstasy. Finally a white flash squeezed his writhing body dry … a meteoric swarm spurted out, piercing the limitless darkness … rusty, orange-colored stars … an alkaline chorus.
The glimmer trailed on and disappeared at last. The woman’s hands patting him on the buttocks to urge him on no longer had any effect. His nerves, which had streamed into her, had withered back like a frost-bitten radish, and his member was paralyzed between the lips of the conch. The woman, who had thrust out her hips, reluctant to let him go, also sank back exhausted in a breathless contentment.
An old rag rankly sour behind a chest of drawers … an avenue in front of a bicycle track, from which he used to return covered with the dust of regret.
In the final analysis, nothing had been of any avail, nothing had been finished. It was not he who had satisfied his desires, but apparently someone quite different, someone who had borrowed his body. Sex, of its nature, was not defined by a single, individual body but by the species. An individual, finished with his squalid act, must return at once to his former self. Only the happy ones return to contentment. Those who were sad return to despair. Those who were dying return to their deathbeds. How could he possibly be convinced that such trickery was passionate love? Was there anything better in this passionate love than in commutation sex? If there were, it would be better to be some ascetic made of glass. Apparently he had dozed off for a moment, rolling over in the sweat and secretions which smelled like rancid fish oil. He had dreamed. It was a dream about a lavatory which he could never find although he could hear the sound of water, about a common bathroom where the toilet was filled to overflowing with feces, about a long gallery whose flooring was beginning to warp, about a cracked glass. There was a man, running with a canteen. When he asked him for just a swallow of water, the man scowled at him, making a face like a grasshopper, and rushed off.
He awoke. A hot, sticky glue was melting on the back of his tongue. His thirst had returned twofold. He wanted water. Sparkling, crystalline water, with silver spurs of air bubbles rising from the bottom of the glass. He was an empty water pipe in a deserted house, covered with spider webs and smeared with dust, gasping like a fish.
When he stood up, his hands and feet felt like heavy rubber bags of water. He picked up the empty kettle, which had been thrown on the earthen floor, and tipped it to his mouth. After more than thirty seconds,