The Noblest
Talent
And this schooling he provided for me was not intended for his delectation, but for my own benefit: he did not merely give me erotic lessons, he was teaching me a unique lesson: if you say you love, be at least capable of acts of love, or else keep your mouth shut. Thus, it was a kind of sense of honor that obliged me to abandon myself more and more.
Honor: consisting of what, only yesterday, I would have called dishonorable . . .
—Christiane Rochefort, Warrior’s Rest
Mario stretches his long legs, sighs, looking out at the pouring rain.
“It’s going to go on for days and days,” he prophesies, somberly.
“So what does that matter?” Emmanuelle says. “Why do you see even the weather in such tragic terms? What outdoor plans did you have in mind?”
“To be a prisoner of this rain or of anything else—always is to be a prisoner! Anything that infringes on my freedom is my enemy. I hate the rain!”
Emmanuelle laughs, without a care in the world. To her ears, the monotonous hammering sound of the water on the curved gables of the roof and on the terraces of her house has its own beauty. In any case, she is in a mood to perceive everything as beautiful.
“Let’s pretend, then, that we are free,” she proposes.
Her visitor makes a long face.
“Do you feel free, Emmanuelle?”
“Well, it must be possible to become more and more so, don’t you think?”
He nods his assent:
“Yes, that is how we must conceive liberty: as a goal, forever beckoning.”
“Before I came here to Bangkok, I thought of myself as so free that I was even a little worried about overdoing it. And yet I’m ten times as free now. From that I conclude that there must be further progress to be made.”
“There is. There is always something more to be discovered.”
“But I can’t imagine, what? I’m probably short on imagination. Are you more gifted than I?”
“More gifted than you? Oh no. I’m just a man! But I can help you to be eternally dissatisfied.”
“Oh, you have been sent to me, to instill in me the greatest thirst I’ve ever known!” Emmanuelle intones, over-dramatically, but the affection in her eyes contradicts her mocking words. Mario is fully aware of that.
“You’ve said it!”
She feels in a mood for confidences:
“Listen, Mario, I have some weird things to tell you about. I have been violated.”
Mario is totally amused:
“‘If you have heard them say that Parthenis has been violated,’” he declaims, “‘know that these are vain boasts, for one does not take pleasure in our kind without our consent.’”
“I feel so good. God, I’m so happy. Why is that, I wonder.”
“It’s because we are here together. It’s because you have such beautiful legs.”
Already he is contemplating the rain with less jaundiced mien. She leans over toward him, pursuing her confessions.
“And I’ve been sold, too!”
Mario remains silent for a moment, then asks:
“Are you ready for the next step?”
“Certainly, if you tell me what it is.”
“Play your part to the hilt: become a willing prostitute.”
Emmanuelle protests:
“But I have done it already, I tell you!”
“What I mean is that you become a real prostitute: not just for a wager or for fun.”
“And that is supposed to advance me toward freedom?” She is amazed. “I’ve always assumed that prostitution is a form of servitude, and one that no woman would choose, unless compelled to. By someone, or by something: bad luck, thwarted love, sheer misery! And don’t they all end up being captives of their condition?”
“The woman who prostitutes herself when there is no compelling reason for it whatsoever is the opposite of a slave.”
“Granted. But what’s the difference, then, between that and what I have already done?”
“It’s not a difference in kind, but a matter of degree. Simply, more liberty. But perhaps that is not what you’re after? The choice you’re still exercising among the men to whom you give yourself constitutes a limitation of your freedom. You may imagine yourself as ‘free in your freedom to choose,’ but in reality you are enslaved by the necessity to choose! Only when you’ll know that you’re completely open to all comers, and that your lover of, say, the next hour is going to be a perfectly random sample—then you’ll be completely free.”
Emmanuelle smiles, still anything but convinced.
“As I think I’ve told you before,” Mario went on, “all eroticism requires organization. It thrives on ‘systems.’ Your erotic life will be successful in direct proportion to your efforts to render it methodical. What I call prostituting yourself is merely a way of creating an intelligent framework within which you can make the gift of your body; of not leaving it up to trivial preference or caprice. And also, by systematizing the unknown factors, it is possible to achieve a satisfying esthetic effect! Why not regard it as one more victory of mind over matter? Who cares if your pleasure is increased or not—I can’t keep insisting on it too often: more is at stake, in art, than mere pleasure.”
“So it’s prostitution considered as one of the arts, is it?”
“All art is work, first of all. Do you expect to live out your life without ever working?”
“Well, I don’t have to have a job, you know. Jean is rich.”
“And you find it quite normal to sell yourself to him. Perhaps it would be more honest to sell yourself for him?”
“I guess it might be. I’d be happy to do it, if ever he asks me. But why doesn’t he?”
“Straight talk between man and wife—that’s the most difficult thing in the world. And why should it be up to him to broach the subject, anyway? If you really want to be his wife, why not be of some use to him, the way he is to you. It’s his job to build dams; let it be yours to make love. But not just dabbling in it. Be a professional.”
“But I want love and love-making to remain a pleasure for me! I don’t want it to turn into some humdrum routine.”
“Isn’t Jean’s profession his pleasure as well? Does he construct those dikes only in order to make money? Does he not enjoy leaving his mark, a man’s mark, on the body of the earth?”
“Why then is the world respecting architects and despising whores?”
“Maybe it’s because those who can see the truth of these matters are too cowardly to shout it from the rooftops, and louder than the imbeciles spouting their mistaken notions! But two thousand years of hypocrisy and stupidity won’t determine destiny forever. Human beings are now old enough to understand that their moral pretenses—so young, yet so decrepit at the same time—are merely ridiculous. Never mind that they’re ugly as well, that doesn’t seem to bother them. Let’s just try to demonstrate to them where these morals are entirely arbitrary, and what a confusion of values results from their obfuscations and involutions! They have nothing but praise for the woman who rents out her body to be a beast of burden or a machine slave—or even exposes it as a photographer’s model: and no one finds their moral sense outraged by the fact that her employer remunerates her for such services, which are physical services, at that! But it is not legitimate, it is not decent, it is downright sinful, it is not meritorious, it is obscene, sordid, shocking, sacrilegious, if she decides to utilize the most delightful faculties of her body! Does that mean that it is less dignified to make love than to sit typing arrest warrants?”
“But if all women were such gallant ladies, who would answer the phone?”
“Are those two functions so incompatible? The only secretaries I have any respect for are those who whore.”
“And who are physically well-endowed, I should think.”
“That’s absolutely right. Those whom nature has blessed with a much more generous talent for compiling card indexes than for the arts of the flesh we shall certainly be pleased to leave among their dear filing cabinets. But you, born beautiful as any man’s dream, is it conceivable that your life could be dedicated to paper work?”
“In other words, all pretty girls ought to be pussy for sale?”
“Well, God willing, that’s what they are! Matter of fact, I’m pleased to see that the heiresses of our nobility are much more tempted by such possibilities than by any convent, these days. What better proof that the light of the spirit has at long last begun to glimmer, even in our poor civilization?”
“If that’s the case, Anna Maria, your dear cousin, must be quite behind the times.”
“Well, would you like her to turn around and get ahead of you?”
“All right, I’ll start working,” Emmanuelle says.
“Come on, don’t look so downcast,” Mario says with a big grin. “It’s a very sweet kind of labor, isn’t it. . . .”
“Well, if it’s just a matter of not being idle,” she sighs, “I don’t really mind at all. But I suppose that it’s a problem of mine, to find words more shocking than acts. If only that job went by another name. . . .”
“But that’s just it: I won’t gild the lily! I’m simply reminding you of your calling as a woman, and telling you, eschewing euphemism, that the most satisfactory way of achieving it is by becoming a whore.”
“You have to admit, though, that you’ve been depicting prostitution only in its rosiest aspects! I’m sure I won’t find it all that wonderful to be pawed over by some obese old man. Not to mention the diseases he may have.”
“My dear, whoever would refrain from eating oysters, just because now and again you come across a bad one? Why not think about the pleasant surprises. . . .”
“The men I find attractive don’t have to pay me.”
“Don’t you ever suspect that they’d perhaps prefer to pay you in cash, instead of having to please you?’
“So I’m supposed to prostitute myself in order to make them feel at their ease? I’ve heard that one before. . . .”
“Well, that’s good. Maybe you had occasion to think it over, then. If you did think about it, I’m sure you realized that a man who does not feel obliged to pretend mad passion and cut a dashing figure stands a better chance of concentrating on what it is he’s really doing when he is fucking. You should be grateful to him for that.”
“But don’t men really enjoy it more when they get to execute a regular seduction? Aren’t they prouder about it, later?”
“They do it more out of boredom than anything else. Your desirability, well, perhaps it does make you seem precious when there’s nothing else to do. But we don’t live in such leisurely times. Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangeureuses is pretty dated. Alpha Centauri is four light-years away, and we are being expected. I’m sure you don’t really want us to waste more time traipsing down the garden path of romantic dalliance. Bis dat qui cito dat! ‘He gives twice who gives promptly.’ To me, any woman who doesn’t give in after half an hour of small talk is about as interesting as the rain. And I don’t even want to meet those again who didn’t make love to me at our first rendezvous.”
Mario lets a moment’s silence slip by.
“And it has to be on her initiative, of course,” he then adds.
“You’ve made me feel ashamed of my laziness, but now I see that you men want us women to relieve you of every effort, even that of making advances.”
“It is merely a simple division of labor. Let the men take care of the work requiring all manner of exertion, and you take care of the loving. And there’s a very good reason for it: the thing men cherish more than anything else these days, is to know exactly where they stand. They don’t like the equivocal. Love’s present-day fashions have relegated little veils and long skirts to the museum. Love, today, is already showing its mouth and its legs: love tomorrow will present itself as unambiguously and clearly as the structure of the atom. And just as those old ‘humors’ have been replaced by hormones, love without psychic turmoil, love without confusion is going to replace the love of Tristan, the love of Romeo, the love of Abélard, those ancient monsters still retarding our cities built out of light-metal alloys and glass. Iseult’s veil won’t be able to deceive the radar tower’s ever-watchful eye. Nor will our computers be well-programmed with the mumbo jumbo of elegies and madrigals. The truthfulness, cleanness, liveness, and nudity of erotic love make a joke of all those courtly potions, circumlocutions, yearnings, and hesitations of the past, and its incontrovertible evidence sounds the death knell of the old conventions and superstitions. Long enough have we endured that fog and its swoonings and romantic suicides: we long to regain our taste for laughing out loud while making good clear love! The future belongs to those who are able to know and to understand things without suffering. Unhappy love has no future. Emmanuelle, men are tired; and this is what they wish for: that the energy of the world will be used for some purpose less ridiculous and more useful than all the previous breast-beating and rivalry. They want love to give their spirit a rest, they don’t want it to harass and debilitate them. They want a love that talks straight. Thus, in suggesting that you prostitute yourself, I’m merely suggesting that you live up to your own ideas. It’s merely a question of wearing the colors of eroticism in a reasonable fashion, in an age of de-mystification.”
Mario is waving his hand:
“Anything else I may have to say to you on the subject is subordinate to that principle.”
“Well, that’s perfect,” says Emmanuelle. “All right then, let’s go to it.”
Mario gazes at her with benevolent affection.
“You mustn’t let my thoughts determine your actions, dear. Nor should you prostitute yourself because I am asking you to. As a matter of fact, I’m not asking you to. I’m just pointing out the possibility and its interesting aspects. But I leave you your freedom. It is up to you to decide. I won’t take you where you can practice the job in comfort unless you ask me to do so.”
She scrutinizes him, a strange flame flickering in her eyes. He raises one hand to halt the words he thinks are forthcoming:
“Neither should you accept that invitation just because your spirit may experience some quasi-physical pleasure in ‘giving in.’ Free yourself from that temptation as well.”
“And yet,” says Emmanuelle, “is it not an erotic experience to have a man who loves you oblige you to become a whore?”
“Of course it is. There’s no possibility of eroticism between a couple who limits its activities to each other! How can anyone imagine they know how to love, if they aren’t ready to share the loved one? I don’t believe in any other lovers but those who barter their loved ones. I’d say the husband is pretty stupid who does not manage to turn his wife into a courtesan, at least to some degree.”
“Aha, so it’s managing, is it? A moment ago you were spouting about nothing but my freedom!”
“But don’t we often get liberated only by force?”
“Why are you refusing to force me, then?”
“I’m not your husband, nor am I your lover.”
“To tell the truth, I don’t really know what you are!”
“Just a mouthpiece for your own thoughts.”
“You don’t think you have taught me anything?”
“Nothing; I’ve just helped you discover your own genius.”
“So then, when I’m really grown up into this world, I expect you’ll just disappear in a puff of smoke?”
“Were you ever born?”
She smiles at an idea that crosses her mind and asks him, trying to sound perfectly composed:
“Do you love me?”
“At this moment, yes, I do,” replies Mario, not in the least embarrassed.
Now it is Emmanuelle’s turn to gasp.
“Mario,” she says, with serious mien, “I begin to ask myself if you have ever been in love, or if you ever will be. All you require a woman for is to enjoy erotic relations with her, but not to love her.”
“And what in hell do you think ‘love’ is? Is it that you’re still dreaming of some gift from heaven, through some timeless grace, pregnant with mystery, descending from the heights of its transcendence like Jehovah’s fire into the chosen bush? Is love, to you, merely a vision of the beyond, blinding you to all terrestrial reality? A stupefaction of the soul, beyond the reach of psychology? Come on, let’s be serious! That hallucinatory love has never existed anywhere but in kitschy books. You had better watch out: if love is just a visitation, what will you have left once the angel has departed? If one loves someone without one good reason, it is not that person one loves, but a phantasm one has created, and the awakening from such trances often proves lethal. Is it worth dying for such a mirage? Because it isn’t love one’s dying for, it is the myth of loving. Do I know how to love? All I can say is that love is synonymous with our intelligence at its most absolute, and it is such reasoning I practice, in the name of eroticism.”
“If there are reasons for loving, surely there also are reasons for falling out of love?”
“You had better believe it: and may that belief make you prudent and wise. Love is not a birthright: it has to be earned. Take care not to lose the reasons others love you for. You have been found pleasing because of Eros’s presence within you: if you chase him away, you won’t please any more. As soon as you stop being erotic, I’ll stop loving you.”
“What if I lose my looks?”
“It is up to you to remain beautiful.”
“But when I get old?”
“Eros’s beauty does not have to fear old age. It is up to you not to age without his presence.”
“What if I suddenly become virtuous, the way the world at large defines it?”
“I’ll hate you.”
“Or if I discover some other life-consuming interest instead of the love of loving?”
“I’ll forget you.”
“So that’s what your fidelity is like!”
“Why should I remain faithful to those who betray me?”
“Is it treason to change?”
“No, as long as you’re moving forward in your changing. Retracing your steps would be the very opposite of true change: it leads to the immobility of death.”
“And what if some day I get tired of all that eroticism, tired of pushing ‘forward’ all the time?”
“Well, then it is time to die.”
Emmanuelle falls silent for a moment, seemingly engrossed in some complex chain of ratiocination. Then she laughs:
“But before I get there,” she announces, “I’d like to try it.”
“Try what?”
“The life of a woman of pleasure.”
But he hasn’t been listening, or so it appears: he gets up, ambles through the room. The monsoon does not seem to bore him all that much any longer.
“Mario!” Emmanuelle shouts. “Tell me again: are there any dangers?”
“Oh, all kinds.”
She sighs, not at all mockingly. Mario won’t give her time to grow weak again:
“But would you find knowledge itself at all tempting, if there was no danger in it?”
Somewhat defiantly, Emmanuelle points out a fact:
“I’ve gone after it more often than you perhaps think.”
“I know.”
She looks at him, incredulous.
“My God, that does surprise me!” she exclaims.
As he does not appear to have anything further to say on that matter, she picks up the main topic of their conversation:
“I’ve told you at least three times,” she says, in a critical manner. “What magic formula do I have to pronounce before I convince you that you have convinced me?”
She recites:
“In the full possession of my faculties, and in accordance with my rights as a minor, emancipated by marriage, I declare that I find it both desirable and expedient to embark on the experience of prostitution. So take me to that place where I can do it!”
He comes back to her, takes her arm, holds her chin, stares deeply into her eyes—and smiles. Emmanuelle relishes this smile as if it were a kiss,
“Are we going?” she asks.
“No, not today. I have to make arrangements. In the meantime, I’d like to invite you to lunch. In a dayclub.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Just think of a nightclub that’s functioning in the daytime. That’s all. And you’ll have a surprise, too.”
“What is it? Come on, tell me!”
“It isn’t a thing: it’s someone. An old friend of yours. One, I think, you’ll be pleased to meet again.”
“Oh, Mario, please, don’t keep me on tenterhooks like that!”
“It’s Quentin. I think you remember him?”
“Quentin!”
Emmanuelle looks dreamy-eyed: that evening by the side of the khlong, the first one she had spent in the company of Mario; the walk through the night, Genghis Khan, the opium, the phallic temple, the sam-lo. . . . And the Englishman who had been staring at her, incessantly, without a word, touching only her legs, preferring those unlikely boys to her. . . . She hadn’t expected to ever see him again.
“Do you know, Mario—it’s exactly two months ago! That was on August the 19th. I haven’t forgotten.”
She amplifies her memory:
“He’s so beautiful! Almost like that man who found me stark naked in the plane.”
“What plane?” asks Mario, looking astonished. “That’s a story I don’t know.”
“Then listen,” says Emmanuelle. “Once upon a time there was a unicorn, as beautiful as men had ever dreamed of. . . .”
It was just as dark inside as if the place had been a nightclub. It took them a while even to see the tables, ten or so in number, arranged around a positively Lilliputian dance floor. All of them appeared to be occupied.
The ambiance was subdued. A combo of three very young girls wearing tight-fitting sheaths of some metallic material, their hair cut short and the color of moonbeams, legs and face tinted a violet-blue, lips, eyelids, and eyelashes painted silver, was playing, but so very quietly that the newcomers thought, at first, that they were merely miming. . . .
A slender maître d’ approached and asked them, in a low voice, if they had reserved a table. At the very same moment, a solitary shadow sitting at one of the tables waved his arm to attract their attention.
“There’s Quentin,” said Mario.
They went over and joined him. Emmanuelle felt quite excited. He was even more elegant than she had remembered, and his eyes were the color of deep blue Chinese cloisonné.
“Have you been back to see your Muria people?” Emmanuelle asked, smiling winsomely.
“No. Not this time. Too bad, isn’t it?” (In English.)
Emmanuelle smiled, more politely now, suppressing a sigh. There I go again, forgetting! she chided herself. I must start expressing myself more physically. . . . A pity, though: she would have liked to talk to Quentin. Mario came to her aid—she had never seen him in such a gallant and helpful mood.
They feasted on Siamese dishes, excellent wines, laughed a lot. They certainly were the noisiest lot in this little sanctuary of hush, but the other patrons stretched their tolerance to the point of pretending not to notice.
What an extraordinary thing! Emmanuelle thought. All the women in the place are beautiful. She didn’t see a single one who wasn’t desirable: at every table they sat, chivalrous escorts leaning toward them, as if attracted by some flame. . . . One couple got up to dance. Others followed suit, but not too many, and thus Emmanuelle, craning her neck a little, had the chance to admire them one by one, at very close range—to undress them in her mind’s eye, to imagine herself making love to them.
A young girl appeared before their table, inquiring why they were not dancing. They just smiled at her, and she sat down, staring at them with open curiosity. The whiteness and clearness of her face was startling: it was framed by abundant, sleek, dark hair, parted in the middle and gathered in a chignon, which gave her a rather more severe look that contrasted with her youth. Her dress, of some corded black material, fitted and hugged her body so stylishly that one was tempted to believe it the handiwork of some Parisian couturier. A fine diamond collar and very sheer stockings on her harmoniously proportioned legs added to her air of sophistication, taste, and good breeding, which seemed at odds with one’s idea of a cabaret hostess. Emmanuelle concluded, in fact, that the girl was a customer who had dropped into the place by herself and was looking for someone to talk to.
She spoke French and English with equal fluency. When she wanted to know who they were, all of them replied amiably, and she had hardly been with them for a moment before they felt totally at ease with her, just as if she had been a long-invited guest. She agreed to a cup of coffee and then to a liqueur.
Quentin led her out onto the dance floor. Mario and Emmanuelle followed but returned to their table before them. Only three couples remained on the floor, from among those who had started to dance the same time as they; Quentin was an excellent dancer, and the girl was infectiously vivacious. Even the musicians seemed to enjoy their task of providing the backing for the well-nigh professional figures those two were executing, and the other couples kept their distance, in order to watch them better.
She was laughing, shaking her head, talking to Quentin. Unexpectedly, her black mane came undone: thickly it cascaded down her back, down to her buttocks. At the same time, no doubt merely to feel a little cooler, she undid the top button of her dress. She went on dancing, now at some little distance from her partner. She undid the second, then the third button. Emmanuelle was intrigued, watched her closely. Smoothly, in a leisurely fashion, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the girl opened her dress all the way, without in the least losing her graceful dignity, and took it off. She moved over to the side to drape it carefully over the back of a chair, then returned to her dance partner.
She wore no garters: her stockings were of one piece, joining up with a lace-panty-like garment that extended upward in a narrow strip, widening to cover the breasts and fastened at the shoulders.
She was very beautiful: Emmanuelle tasted desire on her tongue. Mario commented:
“I don’t know if this is one of the regular attractions of the place, or if it’s just an individual improvisation! In any case, I like it.”
Quentin and the girl came back, sat down. Emmanuelle complimented her. She didn’t dare ask it she had been acting out of professional obligation or impulsive fantasy: she was quite intimidated by her.
She was even more amazed when the girl asked her if she wanted to dance. Emmanuelle shot a glance at Mario, and he nodded, encouraging her to accept the invitation.
The young, half-naked girl put her arms around her and danced cheek to cheek, not saying a word. Thus it was up to Emmanuelle to tell her that she would like to make love to her.
The stranger withdrew her face and looked at her partner, laughing, as if in response to a witty remark. She asked:
“Which club do you work in?”
Emmanuelle felt embarrassed. She wished she had an address to give her, but Mario had not told her where he intended to take her. That’s just my luck, she complained to herself: if only she’d asked me that tomorrow, I could have given her an address then. I must look pretty stupid. Her voice was apologetic:
“I’ve just arrived in Bangkok. I haven’t done anything yet.”
“What’s your line?”
Again, Emmanuelle didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t even sure she understood the question. Luckily, the other one continued:
“You dance?”
“No,” said Emmanuelle, relieved. “I just make love.”
The young woman laughed again. She did not seem to take the reply seriously.
“Excuse me,” she said, “I think I’ll take this thing off.” She disengaged herself from Emmanuelle and undid, with the same spontaneity as before, a number of invisible hooks and eyelets on the front of her black undergarment, slipped out of it, with great refinement, and nonchalantly threw it at the feet of the girl musicians.
It turned out that her stockings weren’t really part of that garment, after all, but merely the extremities of an entire one-piece outfit that covered her body all the way up to the neck. It was made out of the same sheer fabric that encased her legs, and thus the lovely creature now appeared completely nude, although this was actually a clever illusion. The minuscule blood-red nipples of her superbly rounded breasts were quite able to distend the transparent material, and the slit of her totally depilated pubis was clearly visible.
“Oh, you’re driving me crazy,” Emmanuelle murmured in her ear, when they resumed their dance. “I’m positive I’m the only one here who knows that you aren’t really naked—but, that’s just it, I find you even more exciting this way!”
Emmanuelle giggled, had a slightly malicious after-thought:
“Besides, in that outfit you’re unable to make love to any man—but you certainly can, to a woman!”
The girl looked at Emmanuelle with gentle reproach, appearing somewhat offended by such an immodest proposal. Emmanuelle wasn’t certain, but the girl even seemed to blush. . . .
They went on like that, for quite a while. For Emmanuelle, the experience was a kind of exquisite torment, as she didn’t dare snuggle up too close to the desired body, being afraid to arouse its quite paradoxical modesty again. But the thought that all the others were watching her embracing this mystifying nude in public only added to her pain-tinged pleasure.
Now her partner started whispering into her ear:
“Why don’t you take your clothes off, too,” she proposed.
Emmanuelle shook her head.
“Come on,” said the strange girl. “You can take them off at your table.”
They rejoined Mario and Quentin. The other patrons were observing them, but, it seemed, not more intensely than they had been doing before the girl undressed, and without the slightest indication of lubricity. It rather looked as if they were admiring the elegance of her fashionable getup.
“Tell us your name,” said Mario.
“Metchta.”
She looked and nodded at Emmanuelle, to remind her of what she was going to do.
“I’m going to take my clothes off,” Emmanuelle announced to her companions.
No comment from Mario or Quentin. No one was dancing now.
Emmanuelle’s two-piece outfit was simple enough, and it did not take her long to divest herself of it.
“And now,” said Mario, “you had better do something that befits the dignity of nakedness.”
Emmanuelle stood up, took the young Russian’s hand, and escorted her to the dance floor. The other patrons contemplated them for a moment, and then a number of couples got up to join them, not behaving in the least differently toward them.
“I’d like to offer you to my friends,” said Emmanuelle. “When can you do it? I’ll pay you.”
In the bungalow built of tree trunks overlooking the canal—her first visit to it after that night when Mario had taught her “the law”—Emmanuelle and Quentin are stretched out on a thick-piled Chinese carpet, next to a long low tea table. They had stayed in the “dayclub” until quite late, and the quick tropical twilight is descending. Metchta will join them at dinner time. The water of the canal is the same iris-blue color as the skin of the club’s girl musicians.
Mario is sitting at his desk, writing, pausing once in a while to pick up a book, check a passage, shut the book again, puff at his long Philippine cigarette. The doe-eyed houseboy comes in, hands him the evening newspaper.
Mario’s voice breaks the silence:
“Medical doctor arrested,” he reads, off the front page, “after discovery in his apartment of body of young girl, dead under suspect circumstances.”
“What’s so suspect about dying in the hands of a doctor?” Emmanuelle asks, wryly.
But Mario corrects her:
“It seems there’s been a little too much dying going on at Doctor Marais’s place, lately.”
Emmanuelle says nothing to that. Mario goes on scanning the front page, then adds:
“Personally, I prefer the kind of eroticism that makes people come alive—not the kind that kills.”
Then he returns to his writing, and silence reigns supreme again.
Emmanuelle is wearing a violet-colored skirt, slightly flared, and a silk sweater of the same color, only a lighter shade. She and Quentin are facing each other, lying parallel to the tea table, quite close, their feet pointing toward the desk, their bodies at a forty-five-degree angle to it.
Quentin is running his fingers through Emmanuelle’s long hair, pushing aside the strands that hide her forehead, grazing her eyelashes. He kisses her eyes, her cheeks, the sides of her nose, and, finally, her lips. She twines her arms around the young man’s neck, squeezes the back of it with one hand. He, in turn, holds her tighter, hugging her to his chest. They continue kissing, taking their time.
Emmanuelle’s left leg extricates itself and settles on top of Quentin’s right leg. Her bare knee starts ascending the length of his thigh, then slides down, starts up again. The flesh of her leg, ever more exposed, slides, with all its length, across the man’s. Her bare foot is tense, like a ballerina’s on points: a sweet, plump extremity, just as capable of caresses as any hand.
The more amorously Emmanuelle’s leg behaves, the more Quentin’s starts pressing its errands, riding up and down between the mobile one and the one that remains immobile on the rug. Thus, Emmanuelle’s skirt keeps on hiking up her body, and her left thigh is now almost entirely exposed. Mario notes that its shape is quite probably the most beautiful he has ever seen in his life, and considering what a connoisseur of female legs he is, that’s saying something. He finds exactly that part of them, where the thighs join the groin, the most exciting—especially when seen from such an angle as this, from above and in semi-profile, with its oh-so-round muscles so smooth in front, and, in the back, those hardly perceptible longitudinal creases; the delicate tendons, the subtle and incredibly perfect proportions determining the length and diameter of these great tapering candles of flesh. . . . Mario has experienced few visions of beauty that have moved him as much as the sight of this leg, at this very moment, in this ideal position: stretched out, bent only ever so slightly over the body of the desired male; stretched, yet not distorted in the least; flawlessly sculpted and yet so sexual, so golden, in the saffron-yellow lamplight! Such a leg, Mario ruminates, is just as intimate as a breast. It only exists under a skirt, as it is the high road to that sweet slit, and nothing, once it starts exposing itself, will ever be able to halt the man’s steady advance into the woman’s body.
Now Quentin’s hand descends, onto Emmanuelle’s knee, traces its contours, then slowly ascends the length of the thigh, all the way up under the skirt.
With a quick, sideways motion Emmanuelle sits up, crosses her arms in front of her face, elbows upraised as in a balletic figure, and pulls her silk sweater up over her head, throws it aside, and stretches out again, with a contented little sigh.
“What are you doing over there?” she asks Mario.
“I am describing you.”
Her body, naked now to the waist, is so beautiful that Quentin remains spellbound for quite a while, and quite immobile. Then he takes hold of Emmanuelle’s wrists and guides her hands to her breasts: she obeys and starts caressing them, to provide him with an enchanting spectacle that continues until she comes, out of sheer pleasure at her own tenderness. . . .
“They press their bodies against each other as if all the space available to them were some narrow trench in which they are hiding to escape from some fatal dungeon; digging it, in the broad light of day, the man’s body, sticky with the soil it has displaced, heavy with fatigue and vain hope, has been rubbing against his companion’s body in all its length. The female fugitive has had to remove her soaked blouse, as it was hampering her movements, and her breasts shine forth gleaming and bare in the dismal mud. She has also left behind her striped convict’s garb, carrying the dress she’ll put on once they get out of their predicament in a small satchel, where it lies folded up with the roadmaps and the cyanide capsules. The man’s body is tight against her side: she can’t go on crawling any longer, she lies down on top of him. She relishes the comforting feel of his robust belly, of the lips touching hers, so fresh and reassuring. Never mind the border guards, let them shoot! She is a virgin, but the male organ now opening up her thighs is incredibly strong. Smarting kisses stifle her outcries. The earth beneath them soaks up her blood. This is no moment for the man to be tender, attentive, careful. She understands, she does not mind his hurling himself upon her like some beast, his rough handling of her breasts. She finds herself unable to tell whether she is suffering or deliriously happy. She has been opened and torn wide and filled, made a woman. The sudden shout of the man would betray them but for her body’s muffling it and absorbing it into its own interior moan.
“On the khlong, the lookouts on the high-sterned junks lean forward, trying to pierce the night with their eyes.”
“You know,” says Mario, in English, “I’d like to see ten men, hired by myself, lie down on her, just the way she is there now, and take her, one after the other. Ten—maybe twenty of them.”
“What are you talking about?” Emmanuelle wants to know.
“About you. To turn an entire horde of males loose on your pasture-lands. The sublimity of the idea lies in their great number.”
“Tonight I’d just like to make love to Quentin, Metchta, and yourself.”
“I know. I suppose that’s why the idea of another arrangement seems so exciting to me.”
“I always thought you didn’t value anything more highly than my doing things out of my own free will!”
“Your free will, that’s for tomorrow. Today I’d like to have something else.”
“What, then? To treat me like some inanimate object?”
“Maybe, but I’m not so sure now. Maybe the very opposite . . . I’m dreaming of something rough and bestial, proceeding over your body like an army of mercenaries, paid off by me, to ride roughshod over my most beautiful conquest. . . . But I also want to see to it that your pleasure equals my largesse.”
Mario’s voice takes on a slightly haughty tone:
“Let’s drop the subject. Anyway, I won’t know what it is I’m looking for, until the moment it has already taken place.”
Emmanuelle has nothing to add to that. It is Mario who goes back on his own statement:
“Is there anything else that is as voluptuous, for a man, as preparing a woman he loves for a night with his own mercenaries?”
The contortions of passion on his face suddenly give way to a cool smile befitting a man of the world. As if mockingly, he says:
“I suppose I must conclude that I do love you!”