SIX

“No,” I said to myself one day. “It’s very clear, I have not yet done with Frau Anders. I am waiting for her.”

Frau Anders returned, strangely irritable, from accompanying her husband on the business trip which had evolved into a world tour and second honeymoon. I had never known her like this. “How dead the world is,” she cried, “how dreary the people in it! I used to be so gay, so eager for life. Now I can barely lift my head from the pillow in the morning.” I urged her to come away with me, to leave her husband and his money, her daughter, and her salon.

Perhaps it was the intensive company of her husband with whom she had spent so little time in the past years: she agreed. Frau Anders wanted a final interview with her husband so she could denounce him for driving her by his neglect into her various adulteries, but I forbade melodrama. She would not at first be dissuaded, but I pressed the point, for I realized that if we were to live together I had to assert my authority at once. Eventually and somewhat to my surprise—she was by nature an imperious woman—she agreed to this as well. We waited until her husband left on another trip. She told her daughter she was visiting a relative in the country where she was born. Our exit from the city was clandestine. No one except Jean-Jacques knew I accompanied her.

When we began to travel, I learned that my mistress had an unlimited capacity for boredom. She required continual entertainment, and took up cities like facial tissues, to be used once and thrown away. Her appetite for the exotic was insatiable, for her only purpose was to devour and to move on. I did my best to keep her amused, and at the same time worked at refashioning her idea of our relationship. Before her trip I had been, as I have already indicated, extremely frustrated. Frau Anders did not understand our affair, or my feeling for her. I knew that our relationship was more serious than she thought it was—and I regretted not being able to give pleasure when it cost me nothing but the truth, an easy premium. She must have been aware of my lack of romantic interest in her, but I wished she had been aware of how deeply, though impersonally, I felt her as the embodiment of my passionate relationship to my dreams. Through my willful match-making dreams, she had stirred me sexually as no woman had ever done before and, perhaps, since.

After some months of hasty expensive touring Frau Anders was sufficiently appeased and confident in me to rest for a while. We settled in a small island, where I spent the days near the boats talking with the fishermen and sponge-gatherers and swimming in the warm blue sea. I am very fond of islanders, who have a dignity which city-dwellers have lost and a cosmopolitanism that country-dwellers can never achieve. In the late afternoon, I returned to the house we had rented to take the waning sun with my mistress. In the evenings we sat by the dock, at one of the three cafés on the island, drinking absinthe and exchanging comments with the other foreign residents about the splendor of visiting yachts. Occasionally a policeman, wearing his cape and patent-leather cockade hat, strutted past, and the foreigners’ conversation halted in order to admire his vanity. My senses became very acute on the island, with this reliable diet of sun, water, sex, and empty talk. My palate, for instance: the evening meal, soaked in olive oil and crushed garlic, came to have an exquisitely varied tang and odor. And my hearing, too. When at ten o’clock the island’s electricity was turned off and kerosene lamps were lit, I could distinguish at a distance of many miles the sounds of the different bells, the heavier bell worn by the donkey from the shriller ring of the goat bell. At midnight, at the final tolling of the monastery bell from the hill behind the town, we would retire.

Away from the ingenious conversation of her guests in the capital, and discovering (and at first resisting) my own need for solitude, Frau Anders was openly bored. I suggested that she try to meditate, now that there was silence. The idea seemed to revive her spirits. But a few days later she confessed to me that the effort was not bearing fruit, and begged my leave to write. Reluctantly I agreed. I say reluctantly because I had little confidence in Frau Anders’ mind, and considered that her best qualities—her sweetness, her stubbornness—flourished only because they had escaped her own detection. I feared that the effort of assuming the identity of a writer might deprive her of the scant realism about herself which she possessed. “No poetry,” I said firmly. “Of course not,” she replied, offended at my insinuation. “It is philosophy alone which claims my interest.” She decided to communicate her insights to the world in the form of letters to her daughter who, at the time we left the capital, had discarded the elderly conductor for the middle-aged physicist.

“Dear Lucrezia,” she would sigh on the veranda as we lay sunbathing. This was the signal that her epistolary efforts were about to resume. She would go indoors to take up her scented note paper and fountain pen with red ink, and set down several pages of her reflections. Upon finishing she would come outside again and read the letter aloud to me. Generally she refused all my sincere efforts at emendation.

“Dear Lucrezia,” began one letter I remember. “Have you ever noticed that men feel called on to prove that they are men, while women do not have to assert their femininity in order to be counted as women? Do you know why this is so? Permit me, with a mother’s and a woman’s wisdom, to instruct you. To be a woman is to be as human beings were meant to be, full of love and serenity”—here she stroked my thick hair consolingly—“while to be a man is to attempt something unnatural, something that nature never intended. The task of being a man overstrains the machine”—I beg the reader to note how she confounded the natural and mechanical metaphors—“which is continually breaking down. The violence and rashness and schemes, all pathetic pretenses, by which a man persists in his vain enterprise of proving himself are known and esteemed as ‘acts of manliness.’ Without them he is not a man. Of course not!”

I will admit that if I am to be patronized as a man, I would rather it were by Jean-Jacques, whose haughtiness was at least tempered by the habit of irony that is second nature to all who play games with their sexual identity. Yet how could I be angry with Frau Anders? Her impudence was so naive, so endearing, so funny. And even if I had been angry I would have foreborne, thinking I had no right to judge this woman, having never known my own mother.

“Money, dear Lucrezia, clogs the spirit. False values begin with the worship of things. It is the same with reputation. What should we ask of society more than indifference, more than the freedom to pursue our pleasures?” This was the theme of another letter, which charmed me by its attempt to emulate my own indifference to possessions and reputation, which I had by this time often demonstrated to Frau Anders.

“Do not be afraid of your body, dear Lucrezia, the loveliest body in all the world. Dare to cast aside all false prudery and seize your pleasures as your wise mother counsels you. Oh, that mothers always instructed their daughters thus! What a garden the world would be, what a paradise. Do not let the dead hand of religion inhibit your sensations. Take, and it will be given to you. Disregard all those around you who measure themselves out, saving and spending! Dare to ask for more.”

As she read these lines to me, I recalled that placid blonde girl whom her mother imagined as a great courtesan. I felt sorry for Lucrezia, and angry at her mother for continuing at a distance to play the procuress for her, if only with theories. But in this quick judgment I was subsequently to be corrected, for in later years I learned that Lucrezia had never been an innocent girl corrupted by a worldly mother. If anything, as Lucrezia later explained to me, it was the other way around: it was the daughter’s libertine adolescence which had incited her more affectionate, innocent mother into her own career of erotic freedom. At the time about which I write, however, I saw Lucrezia only through the eyes of her mother’s hectic admonitions, as before I had seen her through the elderly conductor’s desire. I judged her accordingly, as the victim of both.

“There is only one communion, dear Lucrezia, the communion of instinct. For two thousand years instinct has labored under the pretentious dictates of the spirit, but I see emerging a new nakedness which will free us of the old chains of legality and convention. Our senses are numbed by the heavy weight of civilization. The dark people of the world know this wisdom; our pale race is finished. Man with his machines, his intellect, his science, his technology will give way before the intuition of women and the sensuous power and cruelty of black men.”

But enough—I shall not tire the reader further. And I do not wish to give the impression that my feeling for Frau Anders was totally dissipated by our living together in greedy proximity. In the privacy of the bedroom I tested her theories and found her more compliant than ever. I was a vigorous lover (despite my pale flesh) though, as I have said, I found her ardors too easily satisfied. I began to complicate our relationship. There was a young fisherman on the island who followed my mistress around like a lost dog, and I made my absence of jealousy very clear to her. Once she began to doubt her hold over me she doubled her solicitude, and I basked in the peace of the flesh if not of the spirit.

After one winter on the island, I proposed one day that we decamp. Soon we headed further south to the exotic lands Frau Anders professed to admire. Along the way there were many purchases of “native goods,” but I wanted to travel as much as possible unencumbered by baggage, and suggested that they be mailed to my rooms back in the capital. I took these packages, elaborately wrapped by Frau Anders, to the post office myself, and sent them to a non-existent address.

One day we arrived in a city of Arabs, and on my urging prepared to settle there for a time. We toured the native quarter with a fourteen-year-old boy who had accosted us outside our hotel. It was in the annual month of abstinence prescribed by their religion, during which all believers are required to be sexually continent and to fast between sunrise and sunset. The boy watched without expression as we drank glasses of delicious mint tea in the sultan’s palace (now open to tourists) and consumed the sticky honey cakes sold in the market place. Frau Anders tried, unsuccessfully, to coax the boy into eating them. To divert her attention from this impiety, I suggested that she get the boy to give us a prohibited pleasure, since he would not allow us to give him one. She asked him where we might procure some of the narcotics for which the city was noted. He looked cheerful for the first moment since we had engaged him, and led us to the native equivalent of a pharmacist’s shop where we purchased two clay pipes and five packets of coarse green powder, which we took back to the hotel and sampled. I do not approve of narcotics—at least I have not known the need for them, never having appraised my senses as jaded—but I was curious to see what effect they would have on my mistress. Promptly she lay down on the bed and began to giggle. The sexual invitation was unmistakable. But I wanted to see something new and, seizing her by the arm, I told her that we must go out, that the city would be her lover tonight, that it would appear to us distended, in slow motion, more sensuous than any city she had known. She allowed me to raise her from the bed. After putting on her best frock and fussing over my tie, she went slowly, partly leaning on me to steady herself, to the elevator.

The sunset gun was sounding. We hired a carriage to take us to a shabby wooden building by the harbor which housed a bar where sailors and the more disreputable foreign tourists gathered. The barman, a tall well-built Arab, pressed my hand as I paid for our first round of drinks. The band played javas, flamenco, polkas; we sat at a table and watched the dancers. An hour later, the barman came over and introduced his wife to us. The woman, also Arab, but red-haired as well, put her arm around Frau Anders’ bare shoulder and whispered something in her ear. I noted the sly embarrassed look which my mistress gave the woman, followed by a vacant, slightly smug glance directed at me.

“They have invited us to have a drink with them after the bar closes, dear Hippolyte. In their apartment above here. Isn’t it delightful?”

I agreed that it was.

So after the noise ended and the last chalk sums written on the wooden surface of the barman’s counter were added up and paid for or charged, we retired to the dark lodging upstairs. More drink was offered, which I refused. I did not assist in the seduction of Frau Anders by the barman’s bulky pock-marked wife. It was an easy task. All I did was to give my consent at a crucial moment when my mistress wavered, out of fear, I suppose, that I might be jealous and reproach her with our adventure in the morning. The barman and I sat in the parlor and he recited some poetry to me, accompanying himself on the guitar. I could not give his performance my full attention, my ear being repeatedly diverted by the sounds that I thought came from the adjacent room. Perhaps I was a little jealous, after all.

Next morning—or rather, afternoon—Frau Anders was claiming a satisfaction with her adventure which I could see was less than sincere. As usual, in moments when she was aspiring to an emotion she did not altogether feel, she thought of her daughter. “Dear Lucrezia,” she began at the narrow hotel writing table. “Love transcends all boundaries. I have long known, and encouraged you to discover for yourself, that the love between two persons of widely differing ages is no barrier to the mutual fulfillment of both. Let me add to that counsel, dearest child, that love knows no boundary of sex either. What is more beautiful than the love of two manly men, or the love of a refined woman of our northern climate for a slim dark girl of the pagan world? Each has much to teach the other. Do not be afraid of such leanings when you find them genuinely in your heart.”

This letter I burned the next day while Frau Anders was out shopping. I wrote to Jean-Jacques, a letter full of tiresome dissection of my mistress’ character, but thought better of it and tore it up. A letter for a letter. I repented of these fits of censoriousness to which I was subject still, despite all my good resolutions. Once again I tried to think of what was beneficent in Frau Anders’ nature, to herself and to me.

That she was thriving, there could be no doubt. It even seemed to me that she was more attractive. For a woman of about forty (she would never tell me her exact age) she was good-looking in any case. Now she was blossoming under the southern sun and the heat of her narcotic fantasies, becoming artless in her dress and allowing me to see her without cosmetics. This did not make me desire her more, for I found her compliance to my every whim fatiguing. But I became more fond of her, as my passion depleted itself.

I thought I would give my passion one last chance by making her privy to my dreams. She listened in lazy silence, and after I had related several of my treasures, I regretted what I had done. “My darling Hippolyte,” she exclaimed. “They are adorable. You are a poet of sex, you know. All your dreams are mystically sexual.”

“I think,” I said gloomily, “they’re all dreams of shame.”

“But you have nothing to be ashamed of, darling.”

“Sometimes I am ashamed that I have these dreams,” I replied. “Otherwise there is nothing I am ashamed of in my life.”

“You see, darling!” she said affectionately.

“Prove to me that I may be proud of my dreams.”

“How?”

“I shall tell you something,” was my calm answer. “What would you think if I told you that every time I embrace you my care is not for your pleasure, or even for mine, but only for the dreams?”

“Fantasy is perfectly normal,” she said, trying to conceal her hurt.

“And what if I told you that my share in the fantasy is no longer enough, that I need your conscious cooperation in my dreams, in order to go on loving you?”

She agreed to do what I asked of her—had I hoped otherwise?—and I showed her how to enact the scenes from my dreams when we made love. She played the man in the bathing suit, the woman in the second room, herself as the hostess of the unconventional party, the ballet dancer, the priest, the statue of the Virgin, the dead king—all the roles of my dreams. Our sexual life became a dream rehearsal, instead of a dream reprise. But for all my careful instructions and her willingness to please me, something did not work. It was her very willingness, I think; I needed an opponent rather than an accomplice, and Frau Anders did not act toward me with the certainty demanded by my dreams. This theatre of the bedroom did not satisfy me because, while my mistress lent me her body to carry out the varied roles of my fantasies, she no longer knew how to patronize me.

But can another person ever participate in one’s dreams? Surely this was a foolish, youthful project on my own part, and I cannot blame Frau Anders for its failure. I have also thought since, in reflecting on these events, that in her own way Frau Anders did become engrossed in my preoccupation. It is true she suffered from it—knowing herself loved not as a person but as a persona—yet she did not defend herself by finding me ridiculous. She had come to love me too much. And the fact I was not afraid of her ridicule does not diminish the credit due her for transcending her storehouse of clichés to accept, if not understand, me. Fortunately I am not the kind of man who fears ridicule, at least outside my mysterious dreams; but I know enough of the world to recognize it.

Since she had consented to take my dreams seriously, I thought it only just to repay her in kind. But I must confess that I could not match her naive seriousness; my own efforts to convert her fantasies into deeds made me laugh sometimes. I cannot excuse the morbid levity that possessed me then. You must understand that I did not mean to be cruel, though my acts might be so interpreted.

We began, largely at the initiative of Frau Anders, to spend our evenings in the native quarter. It was now summer, and even an afternoon at the wide handsome beaches which adorned the city did not keep us cool through the evening. Since my mistress dispensed money lavishly at bars and cafés, we were always warmly received. She continued to occupy her days with the erotic good-naturedness induced by kif and with her exuberant letters to Lucrezia, who was now having an affair with the Negro ballet dancer, and presiding over her mother’s salon with a success she only modestly hinted at in her own letters. Frau Anders was not that out of touch that she was incapable of being piqued at the news, and it seemed to make her restless and occasionally irritable.

I decided it would be good for her to taste more fully the exotic passions she rhapsodized over. There was a merchant who accosted me one evening as I was returning to the hotel with a new purchase of kif.

“Your wife, monsieur?” he began. “My son has greatly admired her. He will not touch a morsel of food.”

“My wife would be delighted,” I said somewhat nervously. The man’s candor—a quality which I admire above all others—disarmed me, but his utter lack of ceremony suggested an unseemly impatience which hinted at violence should his wish be thwarted.

“How much?” he said.

“Sixteen thousand francs,” I said, having no idea of an appropriate figure. The reader must think of the value of the franc as it was thirty years ago.

“Oh, no, monsieur,” he replied, backing away and gesticulating eloquently. “That is too much, much too much. You Europeans set too high a value on your women. And besides, I make no commitment as to how long my son wishes to enjoy the company of your wife.”

I decided it was well to adopt the firmest tone, since it was impossible not to bargain with these people. “I must tell you,” I said, “that in exactly one week I intend to leave this city to return to my country. Should I depart without my wife, I shall count the eight thousand francs which you shall pay me tonight, when my wife and I visit your house, as a down payment on the balance of eight thousand which you shall pay me one week from today.”

He drew me into a white doorway. “Five thousand now—and—perhaps—if all goes well—another five thousand in a week.”

“Seven thousand now, and the same—if all goes well,” I replied, pulling my arm from his grasp.

We settled at seven thousand that night, and six thousand in a week. It seemed to me fair that a week or less with my mistress should be more expensive, being less tiresome, than the indefinite purchase of her person. Nevertheless I protested gallantly that her worth was far greater than this insignificant sum.

“Assure me that you will make your son promise not to hurt her.”

“I promise,” he said genially.

It seemed to me obvious at the time that there was no son at all. My merchant friend was merely being gallant himself; seeing my attractive but aging mistress in the company of a reasonably good-looking young man, he wished to assure me that she would not be making a disadvantageous exchange. I, however, thought it improbable that a young Arab would desire an expensive middle-aged European woman, no matter how earnestly his dark flesh yearned to triumph over white. I assumed, then, that the stout greying merchant wanted her for himself. Why was I so sure? The month of abstinence being over, who knows what strange fantasies demanded to be executed. I already knew well there is no predicting sexual tastes: had I not wanted Frau Anders myself? Had she not proved attractive to as unlikely a person as the barman’s wife? So it was that on the boat home I decided that it was a virile white-toothed Arab youth who desired Frau Anders, and that she had yielded with joy, relieved to be rid of her tiresome Hippolyte with his dreams and dissatisfactions. At least I hoped so. I did not like to think that there might have been violence and terror and rape and mutilation of that ever-hopeful body.

When she did not return to our city immediately after my own return, I liked to think that she was happy—there is later evidence for this—and that she learned the truth of the brash sentiments in her letters to Lucrezia. For nothing that she wrote was untrue. But Frau Anders had the ability to make truths untrue when she said them. Her letters were rhetoric; I had enabled her to act.

Perfumed and in ignorance of her destiny, I delivered her to the merchant’s door. She stepped in before me, and the door closed silently behind her. I wondered if this would prove a lesson to her as to the true worth of those ceremonial courtesies to women which falsify the relationships of European men and women. If men preceded women through doorways, or if there were no order of precedence, it would not have been so simple.

I waited on the cobblestoned street before the house. In a half-hour the merchant came out bearing a discreet-looking envelope containing the seven thousand francs and kissed me on both cheeks. I lingered a few moments after he went in again. There was no sound.

Apparently, all went well. In a week my friend was at the dock with another envelope, more kisses, reassurance as to Frau Anders’ health and contentment, and poetic compliments to her person.

I sailed directly for home.