“I was very young when I began studying at the university in the capital, where my aunt resided. My room resembled that of Dr. Faustus. Everything was cluttered and chaotic: towering shelves crammed with books I had gotten dirt-cheap after haggling with a Jewish dealer in Zarvanica, globes, atlases, phials, celestial charts, skulls, animal skeletons, busts of great men. At any moment Mephistopheles as an itinerant Scholastic might have stepped forth from behind the large green stove.
“I studied everything higgledy-piggledy, unsystematically, promiscuously: chemistry, alchemy, literature, astronomy, philosophy, law, anatomy, and history. I read Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Molière, the Koran, the Cosmos, Casanova’s memoirs. I grew more and more confused, eccentric, and suprasensual every day. In my mind I always pictured a beautiful female ideal; and now and then, amid my skeletons and my leather-bound tomes, she would appear like a vision, reclining on roses, surrounded by cupids. Sometimes she wore Olympian attire and had the severe white face of the plaster Venus, sometimes she had the voluptuous brown braids, the laughing blue eyes, and the ermine-trimmed, red velvet kazabaika of my beautiful aunt.
“One morning, when she again emerged in full, laughing grace from the golden mists of my imagination, I went to see Countess Sobol, who gave me a friendly, indeed hearty welcome, receiving me with a kiss that made all my senses reel. She must have been close to forty by now, but like most of those die-hard demimondaines she was still desirable. She always wore a fur-lined jacket, this one in green velvet with brown stone marten; but none of the severity that had once delighted me was discernible in her.
“Quite the contrary: she felt so little cruelty toward me that without further ado she gave me permission to worship her.
“She had all too soon discovered my suprasensual foolishness and innocence and she enjoyed making me happy. And I—I was truly as blissful as a young god. What pleasure it was for me to kneel down and be allowed to kiss her hands, which had once chastised me. Ah! What wonderful hands! So beautifully shaped, so fine and full and white, and with such darling dimples! I was actually in love only with those hands. I played with them, let them rise and sink in the dark fur, I held them up against a flame and could not see enough of them.”
Wanda involuntarily looked at her hands. I noticed it and couldn’t help smiling.
“You can tell from the following facts how greatly dominated I was by the suprasensual: in regard to my aunt, I was in love only with the cruel switching I had received from her; and in regard to a young actress I courted some two years later, I was in love only with her roles. I next had a crush on a very respectable lady who feigned an unapproachable virtue but eventually betrayed me with a wealthy Jew. You see: because I was deceived and made a fool of by a woman who shammed the most rigorous principles, the most ideal feelings, I now ardently hate those kinds of poetic and sentimental virtues. Give me a woman who’s honest enough to tell me: ‘I’m a Pompadour, a Lucretia Borgia,’ and I’ll worship her.”
Wanda stood up and opened the window.
“You have a peculiar way of inflaming the imagination, exciting all nerves, making the pulse beat faster. You provide vice with an aureole so long as it’s honest. Your ideal is a bold and brilliant courtesan. Oh, you’re the kind of man who can thoroughly corrupt a woman!”
In the middle of the night there was a knock on my pane. I got up, opened the window, and recoiled. There stood Venus in furs, just as she had appeared to me the first time.
“Your stories aroused me,” she said, “I’m tossing and turning and I can’t sleep. Come and just keep me company.”
“Right away.”
When I entered her room, Wanda was huddling at the hearth, where she had fanned up a small fire.
“Autumn is setting in,” she began, “the nights are already quite cold. I’m afraid it may displease you, but I can’t toss off my fur until the room is warm enough.”
“Displease—you scamp! … You do know, Madam …” I threw my arm around her and kissed her.
“Of course I know, but how did you develop this passion for fur?”
“It’s innate,” I answered. “I already showed it as a child. Incidentally, fur excites all high-strung people—an effect that is consistent with both universal and natural laws. It is a physical stimulus, which is just as strangely tingling and which no one can entirely resist. Science has recently demonstrated a kinship between electricity and warmth—in any case, their effects on the human organism are related. The tropics produce more passionate people, a heated atmosphere causes excitement. The same holds for electricity. Hence the bewitchingly beneficial influence that cats exert on highly sensitive and intelligent people; this has made these long-tailed graces of the animal kingdom, these sweet, spark-spraying electric batteries the darlings of a Mohammed, a Cardinal Richelieu, a Crébillon, a Rousseau, or a Wieland.”
“So a woman wearing fur,” cried Wanda, “is nothing but a big cat, a charged electric battery?”
“Certainly,” I replied, “and that’s how I account for the symbolic meaning that fur took on as an attribute of power and beauty. It was in those terms that earlier monarchs and ruling aristocracies laid exclusive claim to fur in their clothing hierarchies, and great painters laid exclusive claim to it for the queens of beauty. Thus Raphael found no more delightful frame than fur for the divine curves of Fornarina, and Titian for the rosy body of his beloved.”
“Thank you for the learned erotic treatise,” said Wanda, “but you haven’t told me everything. You associate something very singular with fur.”
“Indeed I do,” I cried. “I’ve already told you repeatedly that suffering has a strange appeal for me, that nothing can so readily fan my passion as the tyranny, the cruelty, and, above all, the infidelity of a beautiful woman. Nor can I imagine her without fur—this woman, this strange ideal derived from the aesthetics of ugliness: a Nero’s soul in a Phryne’s body.”
“I understand,” Wanda threw in. “There’s something domineering, imposing about a woman in fur.”
“It’s not just that,” I went on. “You know, Madam, that I’m ‘suprasensual,’ that everything is rooted more in my imagination and nourished by it. I was precocious and overwrought when I got hold of The Legends of the Martyrs at the age of ten. I remember reading with a horror that was actually delight: the way the martyrs languished in dungeons, were roasted on grills, were shot through by arrows, boiled in pitch, thrown to wild beasts, nailed to crosses, and they suffered the most dreadful fates with something like joy. From then on, agony, gruesome torture seemed like a pleasure, especially when inflicted by a beautiful woman, since for me all that was poetic and demonic had always been concentrated in women. Indeed I practiced a downright cult.
“I saw sensuality as sacred, indeed the only sacredness, I saw woman and her beauty as divine since her calling is the most important task of existence: the propagation of the species. I saw woman as the personification of nature, as Isis, and man as her priest, her slave; and I pictured her treating him as cruelly as Nature, who, when she no longer needs something that has served her, tosses it away, while her abuse, indeed her killing it, are its lascivious bliss.
“I envied King Gunther whom powerful Brunhilde tied up on their wedding night; the poor troubadour whom his capricious mistress sewed up in wolf skins and then hunted like a wild prey. I envied Sir Ctirad, whom Sharka the bold Amazon cunningly snared in the forest near Prague, dragged back to Castle Divin, and then, after whiling away some time with him, she had him broken on the wheel—”
“Disgusting!” cried Wanda. “I only wish you would fall into the hands of a member of that savage sisterhood. The poetry would vanish once you were in a wolf skin, under the teeth of hounds, or on the wheel.”
“Do you believe that? I don’t.”
“You’ve taken leave of your senses. You’re really not very bright.”
“Perhaps. But let me go on. I greedily devoured stories about the
most abominable cruelties and I especially loved pictures, engravings that showed them. And I saw all the bloody tyrants who ever sat on a throne, the inquisitors who tortured, roasted, slaughtered the heretics, all those women whom the pages of history have depicted as lascivious, beautiful, and violent, such as Libussa, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes of Hungary, Queen Margot, Isabeau, Sultana Roxolane, the Russian tsarinas of the eighteenth century—I saw them all in furs or in robes trimmed with ermine.”
“And so now fur arouses your bizarre fantasies,” cried Wanda, and she began coquettishly draping herself in her splendid fur mantle, so that the dark, shiny sables flashed delightfully around her breasts, her arms. “Well, how do you feel now? Are you already half broken on the wheel?”
Her green, piercing eyes rested on me with a strange, scornful relish as I, overcome with passion, threw myself down before her and flung my arms around her.
“Yes—you’ve aroused my most cherished fantasy,” I cried, “which has been dormant long enough.”
“And that would be?” She placed her hand on the back of my neck.
Under that small, warm hand, under her gaze, which fell upon me, tenderly inquisitive, through half-closed eyelids, I was seized with a sweet intoxication.
“To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, whom I love, whom I worship—!”
“And who mistreats you for it,” Wanda broke in, laughing.
“Yes, who ties me up and whips me, who kicks me when she belongs to another man.”
“And who, after driving you insane with jealousy and forcing you to face your successful rival, goes so far in her exuberance that she turns you over to him and abandons you to his brutality. Why not? Do you like the final tableau any less?”
I gave Wanda a terrified look. “You’re exceeding my dreams.”
“Yes, we women are inventive,” she said. “Be careful. When you find your ideal, she might easily treat you more cruelly than you like.”
“I’m afraid I’ve already found my ideal!” I cried and pressed my hot face into her lap.
“Not me certainly?” cried Wanda, hurling away the fur, striding about the room, and laughing. She was still laughing as I went downstairs; and while I stood musing in the courtyard, I could still hear her malevolent and hilarious laughter.
“So should I embody your ideal?” said Wanda roguishly when we met in the park.
At first I was at a loss to answer. The most contradictory emotions struggled inside me. Meanwhile she sat down on one of the stone benches and played with a flower.
“Well—should I?”
I knelt and clutched her hands.
“I beg you once again: Be my wife, my faithful, honest spouse. If you can’t do that, then be my ideal, and fully, without restraint, without qualification.”
“You know that I will give you my hand in a year’s time if you are the man I am looking for,” Wanda countered very earnestly. “But I believe you will be more grateful to me if I make your fantasies come true. Well, which do you prefer?”
“I believe that everything lurking in my imagination is in your nature too.”
“You are mistaken.”
“I believe,” I went on, “that you enjoy having a man entirely in your control, torturing—”
“No, no,” she cried briskly. “Or maybe so.” She pondered. “I don’t understand myself anymore,” she continued, “but I must confess something. You’ve corrupted my imagination, inflamed my blood. I’m starting to enjoy all those things. Your enthusiasm when you talk about a Pompadour, a Catherine the Great, and all the other selfish, frivolous, and cruel women is entrancing. It sinks into my soul and drives me to emulate those women, who, despite all their evil, were slavishly worshiped during their lifetimes and still work miracles from the grave.
“In the end you’ll turn me into a miniature female despot, a Pompadour for domestic use.”
“Well, Madam,” I said ebulliently, “if that’s in you, then yield to your natural tendency, but don’t go halfway. If you can’t be a decent, faithful wife, then be a devil.”
I was exhausted, excited, the closeness of the beautiful woman seized hold of me like a fever. I no longer know what I said, but I do recall that I kissed her feet and finally picked up her foot and placed it on the nape of my neck. But she swiftly pulled it back and stood up almost angrily. “If you love me, Severin”—she spoke quickly, her voice sharp and imperious, “then never talk about those things again. Do you understand? Never again. Otherwise I could really—” She smiled and sat back down.
“I’m utterly serious,” I cried, half raving. “I worship you so much that I am willing to tolerate anything from you as the price for being near you for the rest of my life.”
“Severin, I warn you again.”
“Your warning is useless. Do what you like with me, but don’t push me entirely away.”
“Severin,” Wanda retorted, “I’m a young, frivolous woman. It’s dangerous for you to submit to me so completely. You’ll actually wind up as my plaything. Who will protect you if I abuse your insanity?”
“Your noble character will protect me.”
“Power corrupts.”
“Then be corrupt,” I cried, “kick me.”
Wanda slung her arms around my neck, peered into my eyes, and shook her head. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to, but I’ll try it for your sake, because I love you, Severin, as I have loved no other man.”
The next day she suddenly took her hat and her scarf and had me accompany her to the bazaar. There she looked at whips, long whips with short handles, the kind used on dogs.
“These should do the job,” said the vendor.
“No, they’re much too small,” replied Wanda, casting a sidelong glance at me. “I need a big—”
“For a bulldog no doubt?” asked the merchant.
“Yes,” she cried, “the sort of whip that was used on rebellious slaves in Russia.”
She searched and finally selected a whip the sight of which left me somewhat queasy.
“Well, goodbye, Severin,” she said, “I have to do some more shopping, and you can’t accompany me.”
I said goodbye and went strolling. On the way back, I saw Wanda emerging from a furrier’s shop. She beckoned to me.
“Give it some further thought,” she began delightedly, “I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I was captivated chiefly by your earnest, pensive character. Now it does intrigue me to see this earnest man at my feet, completely devoted, downright enraptured—but will this intrigue last? A woman loves a man, but she mistreats a slave and ultimately kicks him away.”
“Well, then kick me away when you’re fed up with me,” I retorted. “I want to be your slave.”
“I realize that dangerous faculties lie dormant in me,” said Wanda after we walked a few steps. “You’re awakening them and not to your advantage. You know how to depict pleasure, cruelty, and wantonness in such tempting colors—what would you say if I tried my hand at it and started with you, like the tyrant Dionysius, who broiled the inventor of the iron bull in his own invention in order to see whether his wailing, his death rattle actually sounded like the bellowing of a bull. Might I be a female Dionysius?”
“Be one,” I cried. “Then my fantasy will be fulfilled. I belong to you for better or for worse—the choice is yours. I’m driven by the destiny that’s in my heart—demonic … overpowering.”
My darling!
I do not wish to see you today or tomorrow—not until the evening of the following day, and at that point I want to see you as my slave.
Your Mistress,
Wanda
“As my slave” was underlined. I reread the note, which I received early in the morning. Then I had a donkey saddled—the right animal for a scholar—and rode off to the mountains, hoping to numb my passion, my yearning in the magnificent nature of the Carpathians.
I was back again—tired, hungry, thirsty, and, above all, in love. I quickly changed clothes and knocked on her door
several moments later.
“Come in!”
I entered. She stood in the middle of the room, wearing a white satin robe that flowed down her body like light, and a scarlet satin kazabaika with a rich, luxuriant ermine trimming. In her powdered snowy hair there was a small diamond tiara, her arms were crossed on her bosom, her eyebrows were knitted.
Wanda!” I hurried toward her, tried to throw my arm around her, to kiss her. She took a step back and scrutinized me from top to bottom.
“Slave!”
“Mistress!” I knelt down and kissed the hem of her robe.
“That’s the ticket.”
“Oh, how beautiful you are!”
“Do you like me?” She went to the mirror and viewed herself with proud delight.
“I’m going insane!”
Her lower lip twitched scornfully, and she gave me a mocking glance through half-closed eyelids.
“Give me the whip.”
I peered around the room.
“No,” she cried, “just keep kneeling!” She stepped over to the fireplace, took the whip from the mantelpiece, and, smirking at me, she made the whip whistle through the air. Then she slowly tucked up one sleeve of her fur jacket.
“Wonderful woman!” I cried.
“Silence, slave!” She suddenly glared, indeed wildly, and struck me with the whip. A second later, however, she tenderly put her arm around my neck and leaned compassionately toward me. “Did I hurt you?” she asked, half embarrassed, half anxious.
“No!” I retorted. “And even if you had, pain that you inflict on me is pleasure. Just whip away if you enjoy it.”
“But I don’t enjoy it.”
Again I was seized with that bizarre intoxication. “Whip me!” I begged. “Whip me ruthlessly!”
Wanda swung the whip and struck me twice. “Is that enough now?”
“No.”
“Seriously, no?”
“Whip me, please, it’s a pleasure.”
“Yes, because you know very well that it’s not serious,” she replied. “You know I don’t have the heart to hurt you. I’m repelled by the whole business. If I were really the kind of woman who whips her slaves, you’d be horrified.”
Venus in Furs Page 7
