The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [76]
Slowly he turned toward the woman. She had been wielding her shovel there until a moment ago, and now she had vanished. Had she fled into the house? He looked in at the door and called to her.
“What shall we do?”
The woman’s muffled voice came from directly behind the wall. “Let them be!”
“But I want to get out. I really do.…”
“But how can you …!”
“You mustn’t take it so seriously.”
“Have you gone out of your mind?” the woman suddenly gasped. “You must have. You’ve left your senses. I couldn’t do a thing like that. I’m not sex-mad.”
Was it really true? he wondered. Had he gone out of his mind? He winced from the woman’s vehemence, but inside him spread a kind of perverse blankness. He had been trampled this much … what difference could appearances make now? If there was something wrong from the standpoint of the one who was being watched, then there was just as much wrong from that of the ones who were watching. There was no need to distinguish between watcher and watched. There might still be some difference between them, but this little ceremony would be enough to make it vanish. And just think what he could get as a prize … ground on which he could walk where he wished. He wanted to take a deep breath with his face above the surface of this stagnant water!
Sensing where the woman was, he suddenly threw his whole body upon her. Her cries and the sound of the two of them, entangled, falling against the sand wall, roused an animal-like excitement and frenzy at the top of the cliff. Whistling, clapping … obscene, wordless screams.… The number of watchers had grown and now included some young women among the men. And the number of flashlights whose light flooded over the doorway had increased at least three times.
He had been successful, perhaps because he had taken her by surprise. Somehow he was able to drag her outside, holding her by the collar. She was a dead, baglike weight. The lights, in a tight semicircle around three sides of the hole, were like the bonfires of some nocturnal festival. Although it was not really that hot, perspiration like a layer of flayed skin poured from his armpits, and his hair was soaked as if he had poured water over it. The cries of the onlookers were like compressed reverberations, filling the sky over his head with great black wings. He felt as if the wings were his own. He could feel the breathless villagers looking down from the top of the cliff, so clearly they could have been himself. They were a part of him, their viscid, drooling saliva was his own desire. In his mind he was the executioner’s representative rather than the victim.
The string of her trousers was unexpectedly troublesome. It was dark, and his trembling fingers seemed twice as clumsy as usual. When at last he had torn them off, he grabbed her buttocks in his two hands and shifted his hips under her, but at that instant she twisted her body and wrenched away. He churned through the sand as he tried to catch her, but again he was pushed back with a steel-like resistance. He grabbed her violently, entreating: “Please! Please! I can’t really do it anyway … just pretend.…”
However, there was no need to grasp at her any longer. She had already lost all desire to escape. He heard a noise of cloth tearing, and at the same instant he was struck a terrible blow in the belly by the point of her shoulder, which bore the weight and anger of her whole body. He simply grasped his knees and bent in two. The woman, leaning over him, struck his face again and again with her fists. At first her movements seemed slow, but each blow, delivered as though she were pounding salt, carried weight. Blood gushed from his nose. Sand clung to the blood; his face was a lump of earth.
The excitement at the top of the cliff rapidly folded like an umbrella with broken ribs. Although they tried to join their voices of discontent and laughter and urging into one,