“I can make you his slave,” she threw back. “Aren’t you in my control? Don’t I have the contract? But of course, it will only be a pleasure for you if I have you tied up and I tell him: ‘Do whatever you like to him.’ “
“Woman, are you crazy?!” I shrieked.
“I’m very sane,” she said calmly, “I’m warning you for the last time. Don’t try to resist me. Now that I’ve gone this far I can easily go further. I feel something like hatred for you. I would truly enjoy watching him whip you to death, but I’m still holding back, still …”
Almost out of my mind, I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to the ground, so that she was kneeling before me.
“Severin!” she cried, her face twisting in rage and terror.
“If you become his wife, I’ll kill you!” I threatened. The words came hoarse and dull from my chest. “You’re mine, I won’t let you, I love you too much.” I clutched her and held her tight, and my right hand automatically reached for the dagger in my belt.
Wanda fixed her large, calm, incomprehensible eyes on me.
“You appeal to me like this,” she said coolly. “Now you’re a man, and I know at this moment that I still love you.”
“Wanda.” My ecstasy brought tears to my eyes. I leaned over her and covered her enchanting little face with kisses, and she, suddenly bursting into loud, spiteful laughter, cried, “Have you had enough of your ideal now? Are you satisfied with me?”
“What?” I stammered. “You haven’t been serious.”
“I am serious,” she gaily went on, “about loving you, you alone. And you, you good little fool—didn’t you notice that everything was just a game, just make-believe? Didn’t you notice how hard it often was for me to whip you, when I would really have preferred to take your face in my hands and cover it with kisses? But we’ve had enough, haven’t we? I played my cruel role better than you expected. Now you must be satisfied to have your good, smart, and not unattractive little wife—aren’t you? We have to live in a sensible way and—”
“You’ll be my wife!” I cried, exulting with bliss.
“Yes—your wife, you dear, sweet man,” whispered Wanda, kissing my hands.
I drew her up to me.
“So! Now you’re no longer Gregor, my slave,” she said. “Now you’re my darling Severin again, my husband.”
“What about him? You don’t love him?” I asked, agitated.
“How could you possibly believe that I love that brutal man—but you were completely blinded—I was worried about you….”
“I almost killed myself because of you.”
“Really?” she cried. “Ah, I still tremble at the thought that you were already in the Arno….”
“But you saved me,” I replied tenderly. “You floated above the water and smiled, and your smile called me back to life.”
It was a strange sensation now holding her in my arms, with her resting mutely on my chest, letting me kiss her and smiling. I felt as if I had suddenly awoken from a feverish delirium or as if I had been shipwrecked and had spent several days fighting with the waves that threatened to swallow me up at any moment—and now I had finally been cast ashore.
“I hate Florence—you’ve been so unhappy here!” she exclaimed when I said good night. “I want to leave immediately, tomorrow. Please write a few letters for me, and while you’re busy with that, I’ll drive to town and make my farewell visits. Is that all right with you?”
“Of course, my dear, good, sweet wife.”
Early in the morning she knocked at my door and inquired how I had slept. Her kindness was truly delightful. I would never have thought that she could be so gentle.
She had been gone for over four hours. Having long since finished my letters, I sat in the gallery, peering at the road and trying to spot her carriage in the distance. I was a little anxious about her, and yet goodness knows I had no reason to doubt or fear. But my distress lurked in my heart, and I couldn’t get rid of it. Perhaps it was the sufferings of days past that still threw their shadow on my soul.
There she was, radiant with happiness, contentment.
“Well, has everything gone as you wished?” I asked her, tenderly kissing her hand.
“Yes, my darling,” she replied, “and we’re leaving tonight. Help me pack my bags.”
Toward evening she asked me go to the post office and drop off her letters. I took her carriage and was back in an hour.
“The Mistress asked about you,” said the African woman, smiling, as I went up the broad marble staircase.
“Has someone been here?”
“No one,” she answered, crouching on the steps like a black cat.
I walked slowly across the hall and now stood at the door to Wanda’s bedroom.
Why was my heart pounding? I was so happy, after all.
Slowly opening the door, I pushed back the portiere. Wanda lay on the ottoman; she seemed not to notice me. How beautiful she was in her silver-gray silk frock, which clung so revealingly to her splendid figure, exposing her wonderful bust and her arms. Her hair was bound up and twisted through with a black velvet ribbon. A roaring fire was blazing in the hearth, the ceiling lamp was shedding its red light—the entire room was swimming in blood.
“Wanda!” I finally said.
“Oh, Severin!” she cried joyfully. “I’ve been waiting for you so impatiently.” She leaped up and enclosed me in her arms; then she sat back down in the sumptuous cushions and tried to draw me to her. But I gently glided down to her feet and put my head in her lap.
“Do you know that I’m very much in love with you today?” she whispered, brushing some stray hair from my forehead and kissing my eyes.
“How beautiful your eyes are. That’s what I’ve always liked most about you. But today they’re absolutely intoxicating. I’m dying….” She stretched out her marvelous limbs and tenderly blinked at me through her red eyelashes.
“And you—you’re cold. You’re holding me like a chunk of wood. Just wait—I’ll make you love me!” she cried, again caressing, cuddling, clinging to my lips.
“You don’t like me anymore—I have to be cruel to you again. I’m obviously too nice to you today. Do you know what, little fool? I’m going to whip you again….”
“But my darling—”
“I want to.”
“Wanda!”
“Come, let me tie you up,” she continued, hurrying wickedly around the room. “I want to see you truly in love, do you understand? Here are the ropes. Can I still do it?”
First she tied my feet, then she bound my hands tightly behind my back and finally pinioned my arms as if I were a criminal.
“So,” she said cheerfully. “Can you still move?”
“No.”
“Good….”
She then made a noose from a strong rope, tossed it around my head, and lowered it to my hips. Then she drew it tight and attached me to a bedpost.
At that moment I was seized with a strange tremor.
“I feel as if I’m being executed,” I murmured.
“Well, you’re going to be thoroughly whipped again today!” cried Wanda.
“But wear your fur jacket,” I said. “Please.”
“I can give you that pleasure,” she replied, getting her kazabaika and putting it on with a smile. Then she stood with her arms crossed on her bosom and peered at me through half-closed eyes.
“Do you know the story of the bull of Dionysius?” she asked.
“I remember it very vaguely. What about it?”
“A courtier dreamed up a new torture instrument for the tyrant of Syracuse—an iron bull, in which a condemned man was to be locked and placed over a huge fire. As soon as the iron bull began to glow and the victim screamed, his wailing would sound like the bellowing of a bull.
“Dionysius smiled graciously at the inventor and, in order to test his work on the spot, he ordered him to be the first to be shut in the iron bull.
“The story is very instructive.
<
br /> “It was you who inoculated me with selfishness, arrogance, and cruelty, and you are to be their first victim. Now I actually find pleasure in capturing a man who thinks and feels and desires, as I do—a man who is stronger than I in mind and body. I find pleasure in controlling him, mistreating him—especially a man who loves me.
“Do you still love me?”
“Insanely!” I cried.
“All the better,” she answered. “You will then derive all the more enjoyment from what I am now going to do to you.”
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “I don’t understand you. Today your eyes are really flashing with something like cruelty, and you’re so strangely beautiful—so entirely Venus in Furs.”
In lieu of replying, Wanda put her arms around my neck and kissed me. At that instant I was again overwhelmed by the full fanaticism of my passion.
“Well, where is the whip?” I asked.
Wanda laughed and took two steps back.
“So you absolutely want to get whipped?” she cried, haughtily tossing her head.
“Yes.”
All at once, Wanda’s face was utterly transformed, as if twisted with anger. For a moment she even looked ugly.
“Then whip him!” she cried loudly.
That same instant the beautiful Greek thrust his head with its black curls through the curtains of her canopy bed. At first I was speechless, numb. The situation was dreadfully funny—I would have laughed myself if it hadn’t been so desperately dismal, so degrading for me.
It surpassed my fantasies. Cold shivers ran up and down my spine as my rival stepped forth in his riding boots, his snug white breeches, his short velvet jacket, and my eyes fell on his athletic physique.
“You are truly cruel,” he said, turning to Wanda.
“Only a pleasure-seeker,” she retorted with wild humor. “Pleasure alone makes existence worthwhile. A pleasure-seeker has a difficult time parting from life. The person who is needy or suffers welcomes death like a friend. But the person who wants pleasure has to take life cheerfully as people did in ancient Greece. He mustn’t shy away from indulging at other people’s expense, he must never feel pity. He must harness others to his carriage, to his plow like animals. He must enslave people who feel, who wish to have pleasure like him; he must exploit them without regret for his service, for his delights. He must never ask whether they feel good about it or whether they perish. He must always bear in mind: If they had me in their control, they would do the same to me, and I would have to pay for their enjoyments with my sweat, my blood, my soul. Such was the world of the Ancients. Enjoyment and cruelty, freedom and slavery have always gone hand in hand. People who want to live like Olympian gods must have slaves whom they throw into their fishponds and gladiators who fight during their masters’ sumptuous banquets—and the pleasure-seekers never care if some blood splatters on them.”
Her words brought me fully to my senses.
“Untie me!” I yelled angrily.
“Aren’t you my slave, my property?” replied Wanda. “Should I show you the contract?”
“Untie me!” I threatened loudly. “Or else—” I strained at the ropes.
“Can he get loose?” she asked. “He threatened to kill me.”
“Don’t worry,” said the Greek, testing my bonds.
“I’ll scream for help,” I began again.
“No one will hear you,” countered Wanda, “and no one will prevent me from again abusing your most sacred feelings and playing a frivolous game with you.” And with satanic scorn she repeated the phrases of my letter.
“Do you find me merely cruel and ruthless at this moment or am I about to get common? What? Do you still love me or do you already hate and despise me? Here is the whip.” She handed it to the Greek, who hurried over to me.
“Don’t you dare!” I cried, shaking with outrage. “I won’t put up with anything from you—”
“You believe that only because I’m not wearing fur,” the Greek retorted with a frivolous smirk, and he took his short sable from the bed.
“You’re delicious!” cried Wanda, kissing him and helping him into the fur.
“May I really whip him?” he asked.
“Do whatever you like to him,” replied Wanda.
“Beast!” I sputtered indignantly.
The Greek fixed his cold tigerish glare on me and tested the whip. His muscles swelled as he hauled back and let it whistle through the air; and I was bound like Marsyas and had to watch Apollo preparing to flay me.
My eyes wandered about the room and paused on the ceiling, where Samson, at Delilah’s feet, was being blinded by the Philistines. At that moment the painting struck me as a symbol, an eternal allegory of man’s passion, lust, his love for woman. “Each of us is ultimately a Samson,” I thought to myself, “and, like it or not, we are ultimately betrayed by the woman we love, whether she wears a cloth bodice or a sable fur.”
“Now observe me training him,” cried the Greek. He bared his teeth, and his face took on the bloodthirsty expression that had frightened me the very first time I had seen him.
And he began to whip me—so ruthlessly, so dreadfully, that I winced under every stroke, and my entire body began trembling in pain. Indeed tears ran down my cheeks, while Wanda lay on the sofa, clad in her fur jacket and propped on one arm, watching with cruel curiosity and convulsed with laughter.
There is no describing the feeling of being mistreated by a successful rival in front of the woman you worship. I was dying of shame and despair.
And the most humiliating thing of all was that in my woeful situation, under Apollo’s whip and amid the cruel laughter of my Venus, I initially felt a kind of fantastic, suprasensual fascination—but Apollo lashed the poetry out of me, stroke by stroke, until I finally clenched my teeth in powerless rage and cursed myself, my lustful imagination, cursed women and love.
I suddenly saw with dreadful clarity how blind lust and passion have led men since Holofernes and Agamemnon into the snare, into the net of the treacherous woman, into misery, slavery, and death.
It was like awakening from a dream.
My blood was already flowing under the whip, I was writhing like a worm being trampled; but he kept pitilessly whipping away, and she kept pitilessly laughing away while closing the packed trunks, slipping into her traveling fur—and she was still laughing as she strode down the stairs on his arm and mounted into the carriage.
Then everything was silent for an instant.
I listened breathlessly.
Now the carriage door shut, the horses started trotting, the carriage rolled for a while—then everything was over.
For an instant I thought of taking revenge, killing him; but I was bound by the wretched contract. I had no choice but to keep my word and clench my teeth.
My first desire after that cruel catastrophe of my life was to find strenuous tasks, danger, deprivation. I wanted to join the army and go to Asia or Algiers; but my father, who was old and ill, needed me.
So I quietly returned home and for two years I helped him endure his troubles and run the estate; and I learned something that I hadn’t previously known and that now revived me like a drink of fresh water: to work and to fulfill obligations. Then my father died, and I became the landowner; but nothing else changed. I put on the Spanish boots and I now lead a fairly reasonable life as if the old man were standing behind me, peering over my shoulder with his large, intelligent eyes.
One day I received a crate accompanied by a letter. I recognized Wanda’s handwriting.
Strangely moved, I opened the letter and read:
Mein Herr,
Now that three years have flowed by since that night in Florence, I must again confess to you that I loved you very deeply. But you yourself smothered my feelings with your fantastic surrender, with your insane passion. The moment you became my slave, I felt that you could never be my husband; but I found it piquant to embody your ideal and perhaps, while having delicious fun, to cure you.<
br />
I found the strong man whom I needed and with whom I was as happy as one can be on this comical ball of clay.
But, like all human happiness, mine was very brief. Roughly a year ago he was killed in a duel, and I have been living in Paris ever since, like an Aspasia.
And what about you? Your life can’t possibly lack sunshine if your imagination has lost its hold on you, and those features that at first drew me so powerfully have come to the fore in you: clarity of thought, kindness of heart, and, above all: moral earnestness.
I hope that you were healed under my whip; the therapy was cruel but radical. To remind you of that time and the woman who passionately loved you, I am sending you the portrait painted by the poor German.
Venus in Furs
I had to smile, and as I became absorbed in my thoughts, the beautiful woman in the ermine-trimmed velvet jacket suddenly stood before me, whip in hand. And I continued smiling at the woman I had loved so insanely, at the fur jacket that had once delighted me so deeply, at the whip. And I finally smiled at my pains and I said to myself: “The therapy was cruel but radical. The main thing is: I am healed.”
“Well, and the moral of the story?” I asked Severin, placing the manuscript on the table.
“The moral is that I was an ass,” he cried without turning toward me—he seemed embarrassed. “If only I had whipped her.”
“A curious method,” I replied. “It may work with your peasant girls—”
“Oh, they’re used to it,” he answered briskly. “Imagine the effect, however, on our fine, high-strung, hysterical ladies….”
“But what about the moral?” I asked.
“The moral is that woman, as Nature has created her and as she is currently reared by man, is his enemy and can be only his slave or his despot, but never his companion. She will be able to become his companion only when she has the same rights as he, when she is his equal in education and work.
“Now we have the choice of being either hammer or anvil, and I was an ass to make myself a woman’s slave—do you understand? Hence the moral of the story: He who lets himself be whipped deserves to be whipped.
“The blows, as you see, were highly beneficial. The rosy, suprasensual fog has dissolved, and no one will make me again believe that the sacred monkeys of Benares or Plato’s rooster are the image of God.”12
Venus in Furs Page 15
