Deus Escreve
Direito Por Linhas Tortas
God writes straight on crooked lines.
—Old Portuguese Proverb
I have caused great calamities, I have depopulated
entire provinces and kingdoms. But I did this for the
love of Christ and His Holy Mother.
—Isabella the Catholic,
Queen of Castile and Leon
Let us seek, as those seek who will find, and let us find
like those who find, and have to go on seeking.
—Saint Augustine
Marie-Anne surged out of the landscape one early afternoon, the air blue with the damp sighs of the earth exhausted by the rain. Emmanuelle was sitting on the threshold, resting her chin on one knee, the other leg stretched out straight in front of her, gazing into the rain-washed frangipani trees, waiting for Anna Maria. A week had passed since her last session with her.
“It’s you! You!” she shouted, scrambling to greet her little friend. “Where did you come from? How come you’re here?”
With both hands she took hold of Marie-Anne’s golden-blonde plaits, laughing out loud with the pleasure of rubbing her lips against the girl’s sea-and-suntanned cheeks.
“I’m here with Daddy: he needed Mom to be here, because there are people coming from Paris. We’ll be here all week.”
“Only a week!” exclaimed Emmanuelle, sounding disappointed.
“Why haven’t you come to visit with us by the seaside?” Marie-Anne said. “I told you to.”
Then she extricated herself:
“Please stop pulling my hair. It hurts.”
With lightning speed, Emmanuelle tied the two plaits in a knot and twisted them around Marie-Anne’s neck, as if to strangle her.
“Oh, I’ve missed you. You’re so pretty!”
“So you had forgotten?”
“You’ve grown even more beautiful.”
“Well, that’s just normal.”
Emmanuelle had a twinge of anxiety:
“What about me, do you still like me?”
“Well, I have to find out. What have you been doing while I haven’t been around to keep an eye on you?”
“Terrible things, just terrible!”
“You better prove that.”
“Why don’t you start by confessing your misdeeds. This time you’ll talk and I’ll listen. The roles have been reversed.”
“Come on, how do you justify that?”
“Because this time around I’m the less virginal one.”
There was a glimmer of skepticism in Marie-Anne’s smoldering green eyes.
“Seems like you’re cold-shouldering Mario these days,” the fey creature said, with studied nonchalance. “You’re not seeing him any more?”
“That’s because I’ve been such a great success: he just has to wait in line, like everyone else.”
It was necessary to show who was boss:
“But don’t you try to sidetrack me! Tell me, now. Have you had any adventures?”
“Oh, thousands.”
“Well, let’s hear about one, for starters.”
The open-throttle roar of a sports car made them spin around to look down to the road.
“What kind of a machine is that?” Marie-Anne wondered. “And who’s the driver?”
“That’s Anna Maria Serguine. Do you know her?”
“Oh, her. She’s painting your portrait. I’ll watch you.”
“But you know everything! How come you’re so well-informed?”
Marie-Anne half closed her eyes, and, with a sleepy glance at her friend, passed on to another question, in her very own manner:
“I hope it’ll come out nice, that portrait.”
“I’m sure of that. But it’s only my face. Pity.”
“You should have a male artist do the rest.”
“Have you been making love?” twittered Anna Maria, gaily.
Emmanuelle stared at her in amazement.
“No . . . Why do you ask?”
“Well, if you won’t make love to this marvelous creature,” Anna Maria stated matter-of-factly, “then, who’ll you ever make it with?”
“I see, you’re just trying to poke fun at me!”
“Not at all. I’m just trying to think the way you do.”
Marie-Anne adopted a haughty tone:
“Don’t ever believe Emmanuelle when she tells you she’s a Lesbian. That’s what she tells all the men.”
“Have you any idea what you’re talking about?” Emmanuelle said, suddenly bristling. “Anna Maria is right, it’s time for me to have a go at you.”
Her voice sounded a note of command:
“First of all, what are you doing here with all those clothes on? Come on, get naked.”
“But surely that would shock your visitor. . . .”
“Not in the least,” the Italian girl said, totally baffling Emmanuelle. “On the contrary!”
“Well, then.” Marie-Anne curtseyed lightly, affecting complaisance.
She stripped, in a second or two, and strutted to and fro in front of her elders.
“You find me satisfactory?”
“Oh, yes,” said Anna Maria. “I’ll put you on my list. As soon as I’ve finished Emmanuelle, I want to do a sculpture of you.”
“In what material?”
“Can’t say that yet. In something that feels soft to the touch.”
“And thus, Anna Maria will discover Sapphic love,” Emmanuelle intoned, “through the medium of marble!”
“I’d like that,” said Marie-Anne. “I’d like people to fondle my statue. . . .”
“Come over here,” said Emmanuelle. “Let me feel your tits.”
Marie-Anne obeyed immediately, and her friend reached out and started rubbing her breasts with both hands, surreptitiously glancing at Anna Maria. The Italian girl didn’t bat an eye.
“You don’t think I’m being disgusting?” Emmanuelle said.
Anna Maria feigned innocence:
“Do you think I’d be able to sculpt her figure if I didn’t do what you’re just doing?”
Enunanuelle was vexed.
“It all depends on one’s intentions,” she remarked.
Anna Maria laughed.
“What a world this would be, if it were a crime to touch the breasts of such a living Tanagra!”
“Why do you never touch mine, then?”
Anna Maria did not reply. Emmanuelle decided to pursue the matter:
“What about this, then?”
She slipped a finger between Marie-Anne’s thighs, under the ravishing pubic fur, sun-bleached to the color of an arctic lynx. Anna Maria remained unperturbed, but Marie-Anne protested:
“You’re tickling me. Stop it! You don’t know how to do it!”
A gust of grief, almost distress, swept through Emmanuelle’s heart. With all her might, she tried to suppress that feeble emotion: I’m stupid, she told herself, it’s just my vanity that’s hurt. . . . But, no: it felt bitter, the way her longing for Bee had felt. Why, why? she asked herself, almost furiously. And then, all of a sudden, the feeling was gone, and replaced by a sweeter one. Nothing wrong with that, she said to herself, nothing wrong with falling in love! And Marie-Anne isn’t really refusing herself to me. Her brusqueness is of the same order as mine, it is simply a way of insisting that we have hearts. That doesn’t matter: those are just the vestiges of virginity. As soon as she and I manage to really escape from this miserable age, we won’t feel ashamed to admit that we are creatures of tenderness. . . .
She smiled at her friend as if she had just received an embrace.
“You’re right—we’ll make love when we feel like it! Not just now. The atmosphere isn’t right.”
She turned round and caught a glimpse of an expression on Anna Maria’s face that was so fugitive she asked herself if she hadn’t just imagined it. It did look, however, as if the young artist felt disappointed: it seemed she would rather have enjoyed things taking another turn. Emmanuelle felt thoroughly cheered.
Marie-Anne made as if to put on her clothes again.
“No, stay the way you are,” Emmanuelle insisted.
If she agrees, Emmanuelle thought, it’s a sign that she loves me. . . . And Marie-Anne threw her dress aside again. Oh, life was wonderful!
“Let’s go out to the terrace,” Anna Maria said.
“Listen, would you be a dear and tell them to bring us some tea?” Emmanuelle asked Marie-Anne.
Perfectly composed. Marie-Anne smiled and started off for the kitchen.
“There’s nothing wrong with having Marie-Anne naked in our company,” admonished Anna Maria. “But to send her on an errand like that—that’s where perversion begins!”
“You’re not too good a judge of that,” Emmanuelle retorted. “A naked girl in a bathroom, that’s just humdrum, there’s no value in that. But a naked girl in a kitchen is different.”
“Erotic value, you mean? But eroticism is not the criterion for good and evil. Marie-Anne’s body has its human value, in the fact of her being an adorable thirteen-year-old girl. And an esthetic value as well, independent of the sexual arousal it may provoke.”
“But that’s just it, that’s where the artists are acting in bad faith! When they paint or sculpt nudes, rather than apples, it’s not because art is sexless. It is because they, themselves, and those who later contemplate their works, like being aroused that way! Their intentions are quite, quite obvious. When they calm down again, they paint a few apples: what more proof do you want?”
Emmanuelle gave her dialectical adversary no time to interpolate:
“Don’t you try to throw up any smoke screens, you darling little hypocrite! I know that you find Marie-Anne’s body exciting, no matter what you pretend.”
“But that’s absurd! Marie-Anne doesn’t arouse me in the least. Whereas . . .”
Anna Maria stopped, looked discontented. It was too late: Emmanuelle jumped up, threw her arms around her neck, and said, with a mocking smile on her lips, quite close to her friend’s:
“Whereas with me, you don’t want to paint me in the nude, because you are afraid the sight would make you stray from your principles. Isn’t that so?”
“No, it isn’t like that at all, I assure you! Rather the contrary.”
“The contrary? What on earth does that mean? Please explain.”
Anna Maria was so visibly at her wit’s end that Emmanuelle asked herself if she shouldn’t kiss those beautiful, contrite lips, to console them. But Marie-Anne returned just a moment too soon.
“You don’t want to understand, Emmanuelle!” Anna Maria said plaintively, gathering her convictions round her again. “It isn’t simply a question of vice or virtue. Just because you like women, you think everybody feels as you do. You’re quite mistaken. Most of us aren’t born that way.”
“Well, then they should acquire the taste!” exclaimed Emmanuelle, with aplomb. “You can learn these things, you can learn them without any ceremonial: no need to be furtive about it! Ever since I can remember I’ve seen girls all around me having a good time with each other.”
“Was that because you converted them to it?” asked Marie-Anne, already installed on the big cushions, totally at ease in her nudity, browsing through a stack of illustrated magazines.
“No, the simple occasion taught them! No matter how restricted the circumstances are, once in a while any woman feels tempted, some day, to make love to another woman. Out of sheer curiosity, if for no other reason.”
“Or out of laziness,” pontificated Marie-Anne. “Merely because they don’t have any cocksmen at hand and don’t feel like going to the trouble of picking them up. Or because they get bored with doing it to themselves: why not masturbate with four hands instead of two?”
Emmanuelle burst out laughing.
“That’s just convent school philosophy,” she quipped. “The truth is that a woman’s body is desirable, in itself, to all human beings, not only to males! Any healthy individual knows that, instinctively. Those women who pretend indifference toward the attractions of other women are either irremediably frigid or simply refuse to admit that they are victims of this society, that they’ve become conditioned and crippled by conformism and taboos, sensibility has been amputated.”
“An entire sex has been amputated,” Marie-Anne added. “One way or the other, they are cripples.”
“Right, they’ll never know what love really is: if you don’t love your own, your very own kind, who can you love?”
The arrival of the tea tray interrupted the conversation for a moment, but the subject was bound to reappear. Some remark of Marie-Anne’s, to do with the concept of “taste,” provided Emmanuelle with the awaited pretext:
“That’s the way it is with Sapphic love. It’s a matter of esthetics, first of all. If you don’t love beautiful women, you’re obviously lacking in taste. Anna Maria ought to have realized that by the time she left the Beaux-Arts—unless, of course, she flunked the course!”
“I do appreciate beautiful girls! But in a normal way. Why don’t you stop pretending that homosexuality is a normal thing?”
“Less abnormal, it would seem to me, than loving the Holy Virgin.”
Anna Maria looked offended, but Emmanuelle forged ahead.
“Are you telling me then that your ambition as an artist is to stay right inside the confines of the ‘normal’? I always thought the function of art is to open up vistas beyond mere nature.”
“I try to make a distinction in the realm of the supernatural, between what is divine and what is diabolical.”
“Oh, don’t tell me that you really believe in the Devil: God, that’s bad enough! In any case, why don’t you make up your mind and believe in one or the other: not in both at the same time. Me, I don’t really have a preference.”
Anna Maria was running out of arguments. Emmanuelle had a way of switching back and forth from Lesbos to the realms of theology that wasn’t too easy to cope with.
“As for God, I guess, I prefer Him,” Emmanuelle conceded, regally. “I’ll be right back.” She left and returned a couple of minutes later carrying a huge book with a sumptuous geometrical design in red, blue, yellow, and black on its cover.
“This is by someone whom I think you admire. . . .”
“Mondrian?”
“Himself. Here it is: ‘Pure beauty is the very same thing that was referred to as divine in the past.’”
Anna Maria made a face, remained mute. Emmanuelle handed her the book. Marie-Anne piped up again:
“Tell me, it’s not just because she’s so beautiful that you love Emmanuelle?”
Another day, and Emmanuelle came across a maxim from Che Tao:
“People think that painting and writing consist of the reproduction of forms and resemblances. That is not so: the brush is designed to make things emerge from the Chaos.”
And the next day, another:
“Nature is full of dangers. The human being feels unsafe until it has constructed a refuge, a universe of non-natural forms.” That one was by Marcel Brion.
“The truth is,” she said to Anna Maria, “that we’re still ashamed of our animal ancestry. We’re all the time trying to invent ways that will enable us to forget it. The soul, handed down by God, is one of those ideas: but it doesn’t go very far, really. An artificial space that God hasn’t had anything to do with, that’s better: you aren’t even sure of it: but that is what you are trying to create for yourself when you’re painting. But that’s still just a form of ‘do-it-yourself.’”
She had more to say on the subject:
“Art, finally, is a manner of creation, invented by a species that is not yet able to create nature. The day we acquire the skill to create life, to rearrange the stars, we won’t waste our time daubing canvases any longer.”
And more:
“Mario said that the finished work of art is just a lifeless tracing. Those poor millionaires spending all that money on paintings, they really are suckers! They’re just buying the dead husk of art: art itself has left the canvas, the very moment the painter put his brushes down. What remains is always merely a shell. The work of art is born and dies the very same instant. There are no immortal works, there are only these creative moments that are so beautiful, that wane away before they have time to grow old. Art resides within human beings, not in things. That is what I create when I make love the way I do.”
“A rather primitive approach, wouldn’t you say?’
“Art can never be primitive or naïve. It’s true that love can be both, but that’s exactly our goal, to improve its quality.”
“What’s so wrong with naïveté?”
“It is wrong, because it means that you are arrested at an infantile stage. Eroticism is the very opposite of naïve love.”
“Well then, leave me in infantile health! Your adult adulteries, your complicated sex feasts, your women with male genitals, your exhibitions and daisy-chains are just symptoms of diseased love, that’s all; there’s no art in them whatsoever.”
“If I had any doubt that what I’m doing is not good, I’d stop doing it! Pleasure is not as important as pride. I’m sure there are ways of making love that are bad, as there must be ways of praying that insult God. Eroticism does not obliterate all considerations of shame, or those things one has done while closing one’s eyes to the possibility that they were really ugly. But, as for me, what do I have to be ashamed of? What? I have never done anybody harm. The grace of eroticism lies in rejoicing in one’s own joy, and its virtue, in rejoicing in the joys of others.”
“Well, it’s clear that we live in very different and separate worlds. . . .”
“Are you so sure? If you really believe that love is a fault, then (it seems to me) you deviate from the teachings of Jesus, who certainly didn’t think so: who had rather a weakness for women caught in adultery, for prostitutes, for sinners! Did he ever tell anyone not to make love: don’t do it, it’s bad, you won’t go to heaven if you do it? I’ve studied the four Gospels, and I haven’t found any apologies for chastity in them. So, you really make me laugh, with all your continence, all your virginity! I may well enter the kingdom before you. Matter of fact, I have entered it already: where else lies the kingdom of God if not in the place where we live, men and women who have eyes to see and ears to hear, who hunger and thirst for truth. . . ? It’s the kingdom of this world we have to keep on rediscovering, and it is love, and making love, that helps me find it.”
“You’re just playing around with words: the love Jesus talked about has nothing to do with your kind of whoring!”
“And what, pray, do you know about my kind of whoring? It is the kind that distinguishes between eroticism and obsessive sexuality. One does not collect stale orgasms as one does silver figurines or still lifes: one tries to invent the art of love, over and over, and one surely is more ethical than the average modern physicist.”
“Doctrinaire love versus endocrine love.”
Emmanuelle smiled. Anna Maria weakened a bit:
“But whom do you think such propaganda will convince? You’re just screwing around, every which way, because you think it’s fun, and that’s all there is to it. You just rid yourself of principles that you find embarrassing, and the ones you then invent to replace them don’t, finally, add up to anything but the simple fact that you find it more exciting to have ten men assaulting you than just one.”
“I could take the easy way out: I could remain content with my husband, or with my own fingers; but contentment isn’t the main purpose of my life.”
“Its purpose should be directed toward the next one.”
“I’m here on earth in order to learn! I don’t really need to practice love-making any more. I think I’m quite good at it already. And yet I have a long way to go before I know what love really means. It’s not just that I become an ever more accomplished partner of pleasure in what you referred to as ‘whoring,’ Anna Maria: it’s that I’m trying to become a better lover. And to achieve that goal I’ll need all my life, and all the men and women in this universe.”
“Your ideal is cerebral, rather than heartfelt. Are you so certain of what that abstract human passion is that you call ‘true love’?”
“How can one give rein to one’s heart, without a head? Love, the love that I want to become worthy of, is just another name for intelligence. It’s our blessing to be able to love that which makes us capable of genius.”
“You’re just fighting myths! Yet I’m afraid that your ‘eroticism’ is even more chimerical than those.”
“It is the school of the real. I believe only in the Archimedean kind of principle: the ones proposed by some Daddy in the Sky are too airy.”
“Come now, there have always been girls who went to bed with everybody! But is it to them that we owe the progress of science?”
“Who knows? If those nymphets and courtesans hadn’t prevented men from totally succumbing to the hypnotic haze of church religion, down the centuries, the church might well have succeeded in amputating their taste for knowledge, their taste for life! Without those worms they were, burrowing around inside the fruit of knowledge, who knows but this world would be by now completely castrated.”
Emmanuelle grew more vehement:
“Because of those evil laws and commandments it is no longer permissible to be chaste and faithful. It has become a duty to have numerous lovers, as revolutionaries find it a duty to throw their bombs, despite their horror of bloodshed and violence. Those who cause violence in their attempt to overthrow tyrants are not to blame. The gentlemen of the Inquisition began it! The dark souls of God’s servants are a judgment on God: their reign was one of the darkest nights in earth’s history.”
“The invectives you’re heaping on God, they’re just another way of recognizing Him! You do believe in Him, but you’re against Him.”
“That’s doing me too much honor, my dear: I’m not all that brave! It’s the past that is full of God, and the past is the era of error. The truth lies ahead: and it isn’t my fault if I look in that direction and do not see any God there! Don’t try to make me turn back. Let me go, and perhaps I’ll be able to forget my grievances.”
“The Creator is not that easily forgotten.”
“Isn’t He? Just you try to think of God while you’re coming! Religion was invented for people who did not know how to make love.”
“But why, why then is there something, instead of nothing?” Anna Maria said dramatically. “Why is nature chock-full of mysteries? Why do bats sleep with their heads hanging down? Why are you so beautiful, you who know how to love, who will have to die one day? Science does not answer any of these.”
“Nor does religion. Let’s work at finding out, instead of playing this portrait game.”
“At Angkor, in the heyday of the Khmer,” Jean explained over dinner (Emmanuelle had invited Anna Maria and Marie-Anne to stay), “the monks of the great temple were continually deflowering virgin girls brought to them as offerings by their parents. The girls were mostly under ten. Only the poor kept their daughters virgin beyond that age, because the ritual was expensive, and the usurers would not lend them the money without collateral. The monks used their fingers or their penis. They caught the blood and mixed it with wine, and the whole family daubed some of this mixture on their foreheads and lips. Each monk was allotted only one virgin per annum. Later, when the girls wanted to get married, they just went down to the lake to bathe there in the nude, and the men made their choice.”
“Nothing has changed,” said Marie-Anne to Emmanuelle the next morning, as they were lazing in the sun by the swimming pool. “The bonzes still have a taste for those little virgins.”
“How do you know? Have you been hanging out behind their dark altars?”
“I can know something, can’t I, without having done it myself?”
“All I’m saying is that I’ve been told Buddhist monks never touch women.”
“A virgin isn’t a woman.”
“What an even stranger taste then!”
“Well, they’re different from us.”
“And where do they find these vestals?”
“It’s difficult now. The Siamese parents are no longer as devout as the ancient Khmer.”
“They don’t throw their youngest daughters in with their temple contribution any more?”
“Alas, you know how religions wane. There is no Buddha any longer! Nowadays the bonzes have to pay for their pleasures.”
“How can they pay for them, when their vows expressly forbid them to have any money?”
“They pay in gold.”
“Come on, Marie-Anne, you’re making all this up! You’re just trying to impress me with your terrific imagination.”
“If you don’t believe me, ask Mervée.”
Emmanuelle did not have to look for the Lion Cub. She had hardly registered her little friend’s remark, and it had completely escaped her memory. But it so happened that she ran into the jungle-tressed girl one Sunday morning when shopping for orchids, accompanied by Ea, on the gigantic square in front of the Pagoda of the Emerald Buddha. The curls and twists and swirls of the coppery shock of hair seemed part of the display, like the great blossom of some strange, well-nigh monstrous plant grown in the Thai forests. Emmanuelle noticed how that chevelure’s shapes matched the girl’s pointed eyelashes, the graceful jawline, the very curve of her lips, so charmingly full and smiling in that light-skinned face. . . . Somehow, Mervée’s face fitted in with the curvature of the Siamese roofs: its geometry paralleled the temples’.
“Buddhist architecture and you are homothetic,” Emmanuelle said, grinning at the pleasure of using such an echo from her mathematical past.
“You are interested in Buddhism?”
“Oh, not really all that much.”
She watched two monks passing, wrapped up in their saffron robes, one shoulder and both legs bare, their heads carefully shaven. A ten- or twelve-year-old boy, dressed in the same fashion, walked by their side: he was holding an embroidered silk fan, shaped like a leaf from the sacred fig tree, above their heads, protecting their persons from the ardor of the sun’s rays. It was obvious that these monks didn’t do anything but walk around, seemingly disinterested in everything.
“They don’t look like they’d do a lot of meditating,” Emmanuelle remarked.
“They still have time to do all that.”
Two schoolgirls were crossing the monks’ path, wearing little white blouses embroidered with the initials of their school, and red or blue pleated skirts, halfway up their buttocks. The men of religion did not appear to register them. It doesn’t look as if they’d be interested in that, Emmanuelle thought. She continued the thought, out loud:
“Someone told me they’re not beyond associating with nymphets. . . .”
“It’s not their age that matters. What they need is virgins.”
“So that is really true?”
Now Emmanuelle remembered Marie-Anne’s remark.
“That’s right, I was also told to ask you about it!”
With a half-skeptical smile she waited for Mervée’s reply.
The Lion Cub took her time answering. She was scrutinizing the questioner so intensely that Emmanuelle felt as if she had had an X-ray taken.
“Why do you want to know those things: just for your own amusement? Or are you serious?” she asked, at long last.
Her voice had the same astonishing intensity as her gaze. For a brief moment, Emmanuelle felt removed from the place, even the time. . . .
“What these monks are afraid of, most of all,” said Mervée, “is contamination. Sleeping with a virgin does not soil their purity.”
“I guess they don’t get to do it very often, do they?” Emmanuelle asked, in an attempt at raillery.
“It isn’t necessary for the virgins to be ‘real’ ones: all that’s essential is the appearance. The Perfect One has said: all is but an illusion. . . .”
“And his disciples are docile enough to believe that?”
“The Siamese never believe: they know that faith is the source of all manner of boredom. And boredom terrifies them.”
Emmanuelle was beginning to find this conversation quite engrossing. Until that moment she had only thought of Mervée as made up of lustrous fur and teasing claws.
“Take you, for instance,” the Lion Cub said. “They’d really appreciate you, a whole lot.”
“Who? The monks? Now, really! And having to pretend to be a virgin, yet!”
Mervée didn’t seem put off.
“I’ll take care of all that,” she declared, looking roguish. “You’ll be perfectly suitable.”
“But . . . I don’t find that exciting at all. There’s nothing tempting in the idea of making love to a monk, even if it’s a Buddhist one! I guess I’m just lacking in a sense of the sacred. . . .”
“That’s not the question. You told me, once, that you’d let me sell you: we did agree on that.”
Emmanuelle remembered Mervée’s proposal, but not that she had accepted it. The ruse made her laugh.
“So I have a right,” the feline girl said and stared at her with her icy eyes.
I must be crazy, thought Emmanuelle, but I’d like to do it, to know what it feels like—to be sold by this girl, like an item of merchandise. . . .
“You’re doing it for money?” she wanted to know.
“Yes. Can you do it tomorrow?”
“All right, yes. Where shall we meet?”
Will I be lucrative enough? she asked herself. Will they pay a lot for me? She had already forgotten that her supposed value was in her virginity.
Their boat was gliding noiselessly, poled along by a native, over the ocher and mauve reflections on the river’s surface. The river was high, fed by the rains, and as they glided along, Emmanuelle poked her finger at the coconuts and bunches of vegetables, green ones, purple ones, bobbing alongside them. The water was thick as sperm, reaching right up to the edges of their narrow teakwood pirogue, whitened by time, yet indestructible. Emmanuelle thought that she’d surely fall into the water before they reached their destination, but what did that matter? The river was teeming with swimmers, she’d simply join their noisy frolics. And here were some boys, stark naked, hanging on to the prow of the pirogue, ignoring the boatman’s curses: perhaps it would please them to overturn the boat? But their hands just kept sliding along the sides of the boat, and one of the boys came close to her: his mocking eyes shone like little suns, and she smiled at him. He raised himself half out of the water, shaking his black hair, and stretched out an arm. While she was still asking herself what he was reaching for, the answer came: with the agility of a salamander his hand slipped under her skirt, pushed up between her thighs, tickled her cunt . . . and the kid was gone again, with a yell of triumph.
Emmanuelle started scooping out some of the water in the boat.
“I bet we won’t get there without a shipwreck or two,” she predicted.
Mervée said she hoped not, as their luggage would suffer from that. That’s right, remembered Emmanuelle: Mervée was bringing along a bag containing a costume that she would have to wear in order to perform the desired ritual, the prospect of which amused Emmanuelle more than it frightened her: for what else did those holy men have in mind but to have a good time with the body of a live young girl? All the masquerades and exorcisms did not add to nor detract from that simple and reassuring fact. If her outfit got wet, well then, she would present herself at the monastery in her birthday dress; that was nothing to worry about.
Before they had started out, she had done all that Mervée had asked her . . . After the night of Maligâth and the various reticent hints of Ariane, she had a good idea of what awaited her. And, having accepted to surrender herself up to the Lion Cub completely, Emmanuelle considered it only proper that she should follow through to the end, no matter how bitter, and that she bestow whatever pleasure was demanded of her. After all, it would be one thing more, in the end, that she would have known. . . .
The landing stage which they came up alongside was sculptured with stucco flowers, encrusted with pieces of bright glass, covered over with a roof in the shape of a dancer’s tiara—exactly like the temple to which it led. The latter was composed of many edifices, all of them very ancient, separated from each other by large patches of luxuriant verdure. The most enormous edifice of all, engirdled by an ornate colonnade, probably contained within its dark depths a massive plaster Buddha, like those Emmanuelle had seen by the hundreds over the past six weeks. She felt no curiosity to find out if she was right.
The stupa set in the central portion of the monastery grounds seemed to her far worthier of attention. Its foundation, in the form of an inverted bowl, was remarkable for both its dimensions and the gracefulness of its curvature. Its spire, made out of concentric, ever-narrowing circles, plunged upward most purely, to a height of over three hundred feet. The ceramic tiles, flesh-colored, that it was clad in, looked so lovable in the afternoon light that Emmanuelle took off her shoes and ran barefoot across the grass to touch and caress, with both hands, the warm carapace of the great monument that seemed to be sleeping, shut in itself, incomprehensible and purposeless under the logical sky. . . .
A young monk, apparently just idling about, approached Mervée. Emmanuelle walked over to join them. He motioned them to follow him and conducted them to a rectangular pavilion with a moss-covered roof and white walls, in which the only opening was a thick, screechy-hinged door. Sweet-smelling candles, in pewter candle sticks, lighted the interior. The furniture consisted of some armoires, shaped like truncated pyramids, with gilded doors, a few rush mats, and a couple of low tables with tiny vessels on them.
In one corner there stood a bird, carved out of wood and painted red, its eyes precious stones, its legs like those of a heron, and with the breasts of a woman: it seemed to be admiring the feminine curves of its painted mouth in a ceramic-framed looking-glass, placed at an angle. Emmanuelle stopped to stare at the thing, quite awe-struck.
The monk sat down, fanning himself. A small boy entered, carrying a tea tray. He served it piping hot, in cups that were absurdly tiny: it was necessary to drink several of them, one after the other, before one could even taste it. And it was very hot. But as soon as that had been accomplished, a pleasant jasmine aroma spread over the taste buds. Emmanuelle relished it and wondered how such nectar could fit into a life of renunciation; perhaps there was something to be said for asceticism, after all. . . .
Then the young monk, daintily holding his cup, deigned to address himself to them, but so briefly and quietly that Emmanuelle could not really hear it. But Mervée answered, in Thai. She really knew that much of it? She was talking, going on much longer than the man. Emmanuelle ventured a guess: she’s praising my accomplishments, jacking up the price! The monk appeared as disinterested as ever, not even glancing at the object for sale. But that, too, is just an old horse trader’s trick, Emmanuelle told herself: let’s not pay any attention to that. But what a pity she was unable to participate in all the haggling! It was really high time that she picked up more of the language: her ignorance of it was depriving her of pleasures that were rightfully hers.
As suddenly as he had started the conversation the monk got up and left. He closed the door behind him. The smoke of the big fat candles was making Emmanuelle a little dizzy. She, too, would have liked to leave this anteroom. But Mervée, who seemed to know the ropes, had something else in mind:
“I’ll help you change,” she said.
She unhooked her pupil’s dress and pulled it over her head. Then she opened the bag and took out a long and wide length of white silk, embroidered with gold thread, and draped it around Emmanuelle with unexpected skill and speed. The latter was asking herself if this wasn’t the kind of toga that would come unstuck and slip off her at the very first step she’d take; but perhaps that was exactly the intention, and it didn’t bother her, anyway. The costume was positively elegant. She went over to the kinari, to see herself in its mirror; but the candles were so dim. . . .
“Come on now,” Mervée said.
Emmanuelle sighed with relief as soon as she got out into the open air. But the daylight was making her eyes smart.
They entered a corridor. Mervée seemed to know where she was going: under her breath, she was counting the number of doors they passed. At the eleventh door, she stopped, in front of a carving with large eyes and a big beak.
“Go in there,” she said, remaining outside herself.
In the room, Emmanuelle encountered the young monk again. He pointed to one of the mats with a prism-shaped cushion on it.
“Sit down and wait here,” he said, pronouncing the French words with confidence.
Then he left again. Emmanuelle sat down, as she had been told, folding her legs a little to one side, as she had seen the Siamese women do, at royal receptions and in the temples.
The room had no window, and it was surprisingly cool. A faint, resinous odor was floating about: perhaps from the wooden walls? One could not see them: the sole source of light was a tiny oil lamp, more in the nature of a night light, in its own little circle of luminosity. Yet Emmanuelle felt certain that the cell was a small one. She couldn’t see a single item of furniture in it. After a moment or two, she realized it wasn’t entirely true that the walls were invisible: the one closest to the lamp could be discerned, and as she focused her eyes on it, she could even see a door in it, lower and narrower than the one through which she had entered. While she was staring at it, this door opened. Very slowly, without a noise. Emmanuelle’s heart started beating wildly. She shifted about on her mat. When the door was open wide, on impenetrable darkness, something or somebody blew the lamp out. And it was pitch-dark.
A little moan escaped Emmanuelle’s lips. She mustn’t start crying! she told herself. But she was so afraid. . . .
She felt another presence in the cell. She was sure it was not the young monk. He wouldn’t have gone to such lengths of mumbo jumbo. Oh, she would have liked him to come back! But this one, this phantom that wished to remain unseen, what would it do to her?
She was so tense, her muscles so knotted up, her nerves so on edge that she cried out when she felt the touch of a hand. This childish reaction (that was how she instantly classified it) made her feel both calmer and less claustrophobic. She recovered her customary coolness, even laughed at herself. The visitor had most probably been just as startled, because he had removed himself again. Oh, I’m pitiful, she reproached herself: what will it look like if he just leaves me here, convinced that they’ve brought him an utter lemon? I’ll lose face in front of Mervée, that’s for sure, and she’ll have made this trip for nothing.
But then, come to think of it, her girlish fright had been quite in keeping with her role: no reason to regret it. Even less, considering that the darkness and air of mystification had not been designed merely to impress her, but to hide the monk’s feelings of shame. It was he who was feeling sinful, feeling the need to hide himself. Emmanuelle’s conscience was unperturbed by the situation, and thus she was on top of it, and would no doubt derive some benefit from it. Now that she was not afraid any longer she felt like having a good time! So the holy man thought she was innocent? Well, he was in for a surprise. Sacrilege! Sacrilege! Scandal! ran through Emmanuelle’s head, like a refrain. She shook with noiseless laughter.
Then she stretched out her hands in front of her, groping about. It didn’t take long for her fingers to make contact with something: a piece of flimsy, rather cheap cloth—saffron yellow, no doubt—and then, to the left of that, a bare shoulder. There, then. The flesh was hard, the skin felt like dry stone. This monk was surely thin and tough, but far from young.
An imperious hand reached out, seized the probing hand of Emmanuelle, opened the fingers, kept it prisoner, in order to prevent it from committing further offenses. She smiled. Of course . . . a woman must not touch the cock of one of the holy Sangha. But then, why was she here? She had no wish to play the hypocrite. Emmanuelle struggled to extricate her fingers from the rigid grip. And, in her movements to do so, she came closer to her host. She suddenly got a wild idea in her head: she would undress him!
He did not let that happen without resistance, and the white silk wrap unraveled and fell to the floor before she was able to unknot the yellow toga. Nevertheless, the Buddhist sage’s efforts were no more expert and assured than her own, and she knew how to use fingernails and teeth to fight off the adversary, so that he, too, in his turn, uttered a few cries, and they were not cries of pleasure. But Emmanuelle did not call it quits yet.
When she finally found herself stretched out, full-length, panting, exhausted, on the man’s naked body, she had reason to feel contented with her effort: the phallus, hard as an iron bar, palpitating against her belly, and the burning breath fanning her face, were sufficient proof of her victory. She deserved a moment’s repose.
The monk’s bony fingers parted her hair and took hold of her neck, hard enough to hurt, but it was pleasurable. Then they traveled down her back, explored her asshole, squeezed her buttocks. At the same time, the man’s body arched and his cock grew even bigger: its tip penetrated the entrance to her cunt, and she started swaying her hips slightly, for their mutual pleasure. The invisible hands moved up again, so hard it felt like they were digging a furrow in her back, all the way to her shoulders, gripping them and applying pressure, to make her slide farther down: she submitted, and her face paused for a moment on a chest smelling of sandalwood, and then her mouth received the turgid organ.
She started sucking, dutifully, not bothering overmuch, not wanting to squander her talents; nor did she particularly want the old savant to come in her mouth.
It seemed the monk was disappointed. Brusquely, he pushed her head away, and before she had time to speculate what his next move might be, he had turned and pummeled her onto her side, forcing her chin down to her breastbone—I wonder why? Emmanuelle thought. Then he took hold of her legs and pushed her knees all the way up to her face: she was in the foetus position. And then the bone-hard prick set to work, forcing its way into her anus.
Emmanuelle’s spittle still covering the cock provided a lubricant, yet she had to hold on to herself in order not to cry out. God, how tight I am, she murmured to herself, how that hurts!
When the man had managed to enter her, she realized, with further dismay, how long his member was: she hadn’t paid any attention to that fact while it was still in her mouth. It pushed so far into her that she was afraid of a rupture. She had thought the most painful moment would be when the glans forced its way into her asshole, but now, as he was pounding away profoundly inside her, her eyes were brimming with tears.
She could not have pinpointed the exact moment pleasure began to mingle with the teardrops: it had taken her much longer to come than when being fucked in her vagina. Her tears had soaked into the mat, and it smelled of fresh herbs. After she came the first time, the monk went on sodomizing her, with such strength and endurance that quite rapidly she came several more times in a row. Then she screamed a good deal louder than in the painful beginning. She was unable to say whether all this had taken only minutes or hours, nor did she know when exactly her lover had ejaculated.
And now, alone again, she lay in the dark cell. A satisfied torpor suffused all her limbs. She waited, not knowing what to do, not daring to budge. Perhaps more was required of her: perhaps more monks? She wished she could see—the darkness was becoming oppressive. Or was it the density of the air in this little chamber? She felt exhausted. She stayed as she was, curled up into a ball, heaving a little sigh now and again.
At last someone opened the door leading outside. The sun had set: it was twilight. It was the young monk they had met when they arrived. He remained standing in the doorway, taking his time staring at Emmanuelle, who was taking her time, as well. She asked herself what the one she had made it with looked like: surely he was not as handsome as this one when deprived of the sheltering dark. . . . He had certainly been much older. Nevertheless, such ardor! Probably the Head Abbot himself. His Holiness the Supreme Patriarch of the Lesser Vehicle. . . . Impertinently, she grinned at her guide, whose face did not register any reaction. He simply said, in an even tone:
“Mademoiselle, you can go now.”
That’s right, she chuckled to herself, I’d quite forgotten that I’m a virgin!
The idea seemed so ridiculous that she laughed out loud.
Considering what the old cenobite had wanted to do to her, she would indeed have been a fool to have any qualms about her fraud being discovered. He had fucked her anally, leaving her cunt precisely as “virginal” as when she had arrived. In fact, she was welcome to return!
Or was it—a further subtlety struck her—another kind of virginity these monks were after? But, in that case, what means had they of ascertaining that they were making the first entry through that back door? They must be pretty credulous, Emmanuelle thought: or else, true sages.
She wrapped the white silk cloth around her (and that was another puzzling detail: what difference would it have made if she had come clothed in rags and tatters?), but with considerably less care than Mervée had expended earlier on it. Then she crossed the threshold; the young monk had turned his back on her and was walking down the cloister.
After a few steps, he entered another room, a much larger one, with light streaming in through a big window. He walked over to an almost cube-shaped chest standing on an encrusted pedestal, opened it, took something out, turned, and handed whatever it was to Emmanuelle.
“Our order wants to present you with this gift,” he said.
She was surprised. Was she supposed to accept it? She had thought that Mervée would take care of that side of the affair. However, the atmosphere did not seem conducive to any queries, and she took the box without saying a word.
“Open it,” the monk said.
Once again, she felt intimidated. The box was rectangular, carved out of black wood, fragrant. . . . Groping around for a lock, she somehow managed to slide the lid off, and as soon as she saw what it contained, she exclaimed with delight.
It was, opulently life-sized, a phallus made out of gold, so real-looking that it must have been cast from a mold: it had to be hollow, as it wasn’t very heavy. It was long and thick and arched upward, with longitudinal veins that seemed to be swelling with sperm; the glans was powerful and so lovely to the touch that one was tempted to endow it with the qualities of a mucous membrane and throbbing life. Not even Ariane’s collection sported such a marvel.
And this extraordinary joystick, it really was for her? She didn’t want to pass it on to Mervée! She wanted to keep it, for some occasion that would be commensurate with its beauty. . . .
The monk had walked out of the room, and she hastened to follow him. In a few minutes they arrived at the landing stage. The Lion Cub was waiting.
The young man spun on his heels and headed back to the temple without even glancing at Emmanuelle by way of adieu. She restrained an impulse to run after him, to tell him. . . . But to tell him what? She shrugged, pressed the box against her heart.
“I don’t understand,” she murmured. “The reward seems much too grandiose.”
She showed the gift to her friend, who did not say anything.
“Some little Buddha-statue would have been quite enough. . . .”
Night was descending on the river. The boat was there, with its bored-looking boatman.
“I won’t go back to town in this getup,” Emmanuelle said. (She had already rid herself of the white silk wrap.) How good it feels to be naked! she said to herself. The water looked tempting.
“How about a swim?”
But Mervée shook her head:
“It’s too late. I have to see someone.”
Regretfully, Emmanuelle put on her civilized dress.
“Me too. I feel like making love,” she said, as the boat shoved off.
“With me?” Mervée wanted to know.
“No. With some handsome young fellow.”
“I’ll find one for you,” Mervée said.
“I’d rather find him for myself. Or let myself be found.”
Their boat was gliding with the current, past the illuminated banks of the river.
“That’s right,” admitted Mervée, “you achieve better results when you take the initiative.”
“But it is wonderfully erotic to be picked up and fucked, too,” said Emmanuelle. “We are women, after all.”
“It’s not a question of eroticism,” Mervée said, impatiently. “It’s a matter of conquest. Passivity is no use at all.”
“Well, I can’t complain,” Emmanuelle stated, with great good humor.
“How do you go about it?”
“It’s up to those who want me to take me! They’ve only to take a look at my legs, my tits, to know that I’m worth the trouble.”
“But they won’t believe their eyes.”
“Nothing prevents them from touching.”
“They’re not brave enough to do that, though.”
“Not even when I raise my skirts?”
“They’ll just tell themselves they must be imagining things, or that it’s all their own vanity. They’re scared of their desires, they don’t think they’re real. Nothing intimidates men more than the thought of a snub.”
“But I make eyes at them, too.”
“That’lI just confuse them even more.”
“So I walk up to them and rub myself against them!”
“Only further proof of your innocence and purity; and if they abuse your naïve trust in any way, they think, you’ll immediately call the cops. . . .”
“I’ll squeeze a knee between their legs.”
“Young girls are always making such unintentionally provocative gestures. A gentleman has to be aware of that.”
“Oh well, I give up! And I always thought that they had nothing else on their mind but to fuck me!”
“Don’t look so unhappy. That’s what they have in mind. But they don’t have the guts to do it.”
“Does it take all that much, just to kiss me?”
“Only heroes dare assault citadels. And what fortress is more inaccessible than that monument to virtue: someone else’s wife?”
“But what can I do, then?”
“Don’t wait for them to swarm all over you.”
“Just take to the streets in a bedsheet?”
“The only thing men want to know before they try anything, is some indication that it’ll succeed. Or, even better, that it is the other person making the advances. A sign of recognition is not enough: the situation has to be made clear, explicit, unequivocal. Allusions, symbols, litotes, significant pauses just terrify them. They don’t come alive until they meet a whore. It’s not because prostitutes are particularly beautiful or talented, but because they accost them directly, and in quite unmistakable terms.”
“So that’s why you are into prostituting me!”
“I’m not selling you in order to render a service to males. I’m not on their side.”
“Strange, the way you insist on dividing up the world between men and women. I see all those who are on the side of love in one camp: their sex doesn’t make any difference! Isn’t that the reason why we, for example, enjoy making love to women as well?”
“I’m no ‘Warrior’s Rest,’ no five-minute vertical mattress! There have to be slaves and masters, conquerors and vanquished. I am of a lineage of queens. Men exist for my sake!”
Emmanuelle contented herself with a smile. The boat proceeded down the river. She felt good, in the balmy night air. Mervée spoke up again, sounding calmer:
“The age of the inverted world has begun. Long enough have men been running after girls: now it is our turn to give chase—our turn to pick them, to send them packing, to swap them, like coins of various worth—and of course, our tastes will change with the fashion, too! They have had their brothels, their garconnières where they could pick and choose and grow fat on our fresh meat: I think we must now have our own little clubs, too, our fillières where we can get us some loveboys! And that’s where I’d shut all the men I have seduced, abusing their ‘innocence’ by sucking their spunk out of them.”
Emmanuelle’s laughter pealed across the water:
“You’ll be quite rough with them, then?” she asked.
“As rough as I please. Males are easy to rape, because they believe that it is they who are raping us.”
“They’re not entirely wrong about that, either; or are they? And whether it’s them taking us, or us taking them, they’ll enjoy it anyhow.”
“Less than us. Do you remember Tiresias?”
“No, I don’t.”
“For some obscure calumnious story that he had interfered with their love affairs, the gods decided to metamorphose him into a woman. The switch didn’t hurt him at all, though the deities, always rather misinformed about affairs on earth, did not realize that until too late. Once he had become a male again, Tiresias told Jupiter (to the god’s great surprise) that the female’s pleasure was nine times greater than the male’s.”
“Nine times!”
“No more, no less.”
“How very lucky we are!” exclaimed Emmanuelle. “Those poor darlings! We must be very kind to them. Next time I’ll try my best to pass on a little bit of my own pleasure to them.”
Mervée giggled. Emmanuelle was surprised:
“Don’t you think that queens should have their subjects’ welfare on their minds and hearts?”
The Lion Cub countered:
“So you feel ashamed, doing it for money?”
“Of course I do. But it’s a titillating kind of shame.”
She thought it over for a moment, then added:
“All everybody asks me these days is whether I am a nymphomaniac, a prostitute, who knows what else! I don’t feel like any of those. What is it, then, that distinguishes me from them?”
“Only your intentions.”
Emmanuelle nodded her assent, for once. Mervée reached out, unbuttoned several buttons of her dress, announced:
“I won’t keep my appointment. I’ll take you home with me.”
“How old are you?” asked Emmanuelle, as if her response would depend on that information.
“I was born on the same day as you, only a year later.”
“Incredible!” Emmanuelle said, admiringly.
She fell silent for a couple of minutes. Then:
“Have you made love to as many men as Ariane has?”
“I haven’t kept count of Ariane’s. Me, I have a new one every day.”
“You don’t keep any lover longer than that? No, you’ve told me that you have a special friend.”
“I don’t make love to him. I never do it twice with the same man. I’d find it boring.”
“Are you sure you enjoy it nine times more than they?” Emmanuelle asked, suddenly feeling doubtful.
Mervée pretended to be offended:
“Do you think I’m frigid or something?”
“No, not frigid . . . But it’s true that we’re really quite different. No man truly interests you—nor does, I’m afraid, any woman! With me, it’s the other way around, they all excite me, and I get hot for all of them, I love them all. I could very well content myself with a single lover all my life. If I screw around, it’s not out of need.”
“For me, it’s a game.”
“For me, it’s for beauty. I make love the way I’d carve a statue: and would I carve only one? I wasn’t born to make one love relationship work, I was born to bring the world more beauty than I found in it when I entered it. I don’t make love in order to rid myself of a sexual itch, I do it in order to extend the limits of possibility! I make love because I’m capable of happiness, and I do it unconditionally, because I am capable of liberty. If I were a poet, I’d express my tenderness in song. If I were a painter, I’d enrich reality with imaginary forms and colors. If I were a queen, I’d imprint my name on the stars. But I am Emmanuelle, and I’ll engrave the trace of my body on this earth. I want it to remain warm and alive for thousands of years after I am gone; and in order to achieve that, I’ll make my body acquainted with thousands and thousands of other live bodies: and they’ll all be my love!”
She caught Mervée’s strange look:
“It may well be that you’ll end up making more love than I, Mara,” she said, without even noticing that she had used another one of the Lion Cub’s names. “But I’m not so sure that yours will be as intense. Because I know—and I know it better than anybody in this entire city, perhaps better than anyone in the whole world—why I’m doing it. And as you yourself just said, that makes all the difference.”