by Robert Musil
“Sounds like hard times for your husbands!” Ulrich teased.
Bonadea laughed, and he could tell how glad she would be to occasionally play truant from the oppressive earnestness of her school of love.
But Ulrich’s probing instincts would not let go; he sensed that his greatly changed friend was keeping quiet about something she would much rather have talked about. He professed to be mystified because, from what he had heard, the two husbands involved had so far rather erred in overdoing the “erotic possibilities.”
“Of course, that’s all you ever think!” Bonadea said reproachfully, giving him a long, pointed glance with a little hook at its end that could easily be interpreted as regret for the innocence she had acquired. “You take advantage of a woman’s physiological feeblemindedness yourself!”
“What do I take advantage of? You’ve found a splendid expression for the history of our love!”
Bonadea slapped his face lightly and, nervously, patted her hair in front of the mirror. Glancing at him out of the mirror, she said: “That’s from a book.”
“Of course. A very well known book.”
“But Diotima disputes it. She found something in another book that speaks of ‘the physiological inferiority of the male.’ The author is a woman. Do you think it really makes much difference?”
“How can I tell, since I’ve no idea what we’re talking about?”
“Well then, listen! Diotima’s starting point is the discovery that she calls ‘a woman’s constant readiness for sex.’ Can you see that?”
“Not in Diotima!”
“Don’t be so crude!” she rebuked him. “It’s a delicate theory, and it’s hard for me to explain it to you so that you don’t draw false conclusions from the fact that I happen to be here alone with you in your house while I’m talking about it. So this theory has it that a woman can be made love to even when she doesn’t feel like it. Now do you see?”
“I do.”
“Unfortunately, it can’t be denied either. On the other hand, they say that quite often a man can’t make love even when he wants to. Diotima says this has been scientifically established. Do you believe that?”
“It’s been known to happen.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Bonadea said doubtfully. “But Diotima says that if you regard it in the light of science, it’s obvious. For in contrast with a woman’s constant readiness for sex, a man—well, in a word, a man’s manliest part is easily discouraged.” Her face was the color of bronze as she now turned it away from the mirror.
“I never would have guessed it about Tuzzi,” Ulrich said tactfully.
“I don’t think it used to be the case, either,” Bonadea said. “It’s only happening now, as a belated confirmation of the theory, because she lectures him on it day in, day out. She calls it the theory of the ‘fiasco.’ Because the male procreator is so prone to this fiasco, he only feels sexually secure if he doesn’t have to be afraid of a woman’s being in some way or other spiritually superior, and that’s why men hardly ever have the courage to try a relationship with a woman who’s their equal as a human being. At least, they try right away to put them down. Diotima says that the guiding principle of all male love transactions, and especially of male arrogance, is fear. Great men show it—she means Arnheim, of course. Lesser men hide it behind brutal physical aggression and abusing a woman’s soul—I mean you! And she means Tuzzi. That sort of ‘Now or never!’ you men so often use to make us give in is only a kind of overcomp—” She was about to say “compress”; “overcompensation,” Ulrich said, coming to the rescue.
“Right. That’s how you men manage to overcome the impression of your physiological inferiority!”
“What have you two decided to do, then?” Ulrich said meekly.
“We have to make an effort to be nice to men! That’s why I’ve come to see you. We’ll see how you take it.”
“And Diotima?”
“Heavens, what do you care about Diotima? Arnheim’s eyes pop out like a snail’s when she tells him that the most intellectually superior men unfortunately seem to find full satisfaction only with inferior women and fail with women who are their equals, as attested scientifically by the case of Frau von Stein and the Vulpius woman. You see, now I’ve got her name right, but of course I’ve always known she was the noted sex partner of the aging Olympian!”
Ulrich tried to steer the conversation away from himself and back to Tuzzi. Bonadea began to laugh; she was not without sympathy for the sorry predicament of the diplomat, whom she found quite attractive as a man, and felt a certain malicious and conspiratorial glee about his having to suffer under the castigations of the soul. She reported that Diotima was basing her treatment of Tuzzi on the assumption that she must cure him of his fear of her, which had also enabled her to come to terms somewhat with his “sexual brutality.” The great blunder of her life, she admitted, was in achieving an eminence too great for her male marriage partner’s naïve need to feel superior, so she had set about toning it down by hiding her spiritual superiority behind a more suitable erotic coquetry.
Ulrich broke in to ask, with lively interest, what she understood by that.
Bonadea’s glance bored deeply into his face. “She might say to him, for instance, ‘Up to now our life has been spoiled by our competing for status.’ And then she admits to him that the poisonous effect of the male struggle for power dominates all of public life as well… .”
“But that’s neither coquettish nor sexy!” Ulrich objected.
“Oh, but it is! You have to remember that a man in the grip of passion will behave toward a woman like an executioner toward his victim. That’s part of his struggle for self-assertion, as it’s now called. On the other hand, you won’t deny that the sex drive is important to a woman too?”
“Certainly not!”
“Good. But a happy sexual relationship demands an equal give-and-take. To get a really rapturous response from the love partner, the partner must be respected as an equal and not just as a will-less extension of oneself,” she went on, caught up in her mentor’s mode of expression like someone sliding helplessly and anxiously across a polished surface, carried along by his own momentum. “If no other human relationship is able to endure unremitting pressure and counterpressure, how much less can a sexual—”
“Oho!” Ulrich disagreed.
Bonadea pressed his arm, and her eye glittered like a falling star. “Hold your tongue!” she cried. “None of you have any firsthand experience of the feminine psyche! And if you want me to go on telling you about your cousin …” But her energy was spent, and her eyes now had the glitter of a tigress’s as she watches fresh meat being carried past her cage. “No, I can’t listen to any more of this myself!” she cried.
“Does she really talk like that?” Ulrich asked. “Did she actually say these things?”
“But it’s all I hear every day, nothing but sexual practice, successful embraces, key principles of eroticism, glands, secretions, repressed urges, erotic training, and regulation of the sex drive! Apparently everyone has the sexuality he deserves, at least that’s what your cousin claims, but do I deserve to be so overloaded with it?”
Her gaze firmly held his.
“I don’t think so,” Ulrich said slowly.
“After all, couldn’t one just as easily say that my strong capacity for experiencing represents a physiological superiority?” Bonadea asked with a gaily suggestive burst of laughter.
There was no more discussion. When, some considerable time later, Ulrich became aware of a certain resistance in himself, living daylight was spraying through the chinks in the curtains, and if one glanced in that direction the darkened room resembled the sepulcher of an emotion that had shriveled past the point of recognition. Bonadea lay there with her eyes closed, giving no sign of life. The feeling she now had of her body was not unlike that of a child whose defiance had been broken by a whipping. Every inch of that body, which was both completely satiated and battered, crie
d out for the tenderness of moral forgiveness. From whom? Certainly not from the man in whose bed she lay and whom she had implored to kill her, because her lust could not be appeased by any repetition or intensification. She kept her eyes shut to avoid having to see him. She tried thinking: “I’m in his bed.” This—and “I’ll never let myself be driven out of it again!”—was what she had been shouting inwardly just a short time before; now it merely expressed a situation she could not get out of without having to go through an embarrassing performance, which was still ahead of her. Bonadea slowly and indolently picked up her thoughts where she had dropped them.
She thought of Diotima. Gradually, words came to mind, then whole sentences and fragments of sentences, but mainly only a sense of satisfaction at being where she was while words as incomprehensible and hard to remember as hormones, lymphatic glands, chromosomes, zygotes, and inner secretions thundered past her ear in a cascade of talk. For her mentor’s chastity recognized no boundaries as soon as they were effaced by the glare of scientific illumination. Diotima was capable of saying to her listeners: “One’s sex life is not a craft that is to be learned; it should always be the highest art we may acquire in life!” while feeling as little unscientific emotion as when in her zeal she spoke of a “point of reference” or “a central point.” Her disciple now recalled these expressions exactly. Critical analysis of the embrace, clarification of the physical elements, erogenous zones, the way to highest fulfillment for the woman, men who have themselves well under control and are considerate of their partner… Just an hour ago Bonadea, who normally admired these scientific, intellectual, and highly refined terms, had felt grossly deceived by them. To her surprise she had just now realized with returning consciousness that this jargon was meaningful not only for science but for the emotions too, when the flames were already licking out from the unsupervised emotional side. At that point she hated Diotima. “Talking that way about such things, it’s enough to kill your appetite!” she had thought, feeling horribly vindictive toward Diotima, who evidently, with four men of her own, begrudged Bonadea anything at all and was deliberately hoodwinking her in this fashion. Indeed, Bonadea had actually considered the enlightenment with whose help sexual science cleans up the occult ways of the sexual process as a plot of Diotima’s. Now she could not understand that any more than she could understand her passionate longing for Ulrich. She tried to remember the moments in which all her thoughts and feelings had gone wild; it was as incomprehensible as if a man bleeding to death were to try to think back on the impatience that had led him to tear off his protective bandages. Bonadea thought of Count Leinsdorf, who had called marriage a high office and had compared Diotima’s books on the subject with a manual for organizing official procedures. She thought of Arnheim, who was a multimillionaire and who had called the revival of marital fidelity, based on the idea of the body, a true necessity of the times. And she thought of all the other famous men she had recently met, without even remembering whether they had short legs or long ones, were fat or lean, for all she saw in them was the radiance of their celebrity rounded out by a vague physical mass, much as the delicate frame of a young roast pigeon is given substance by a solid mass of herb stuffing. Sunk in these memories, Bonadea vowed that she would never again let herself be prey to one of those sudden hurricanes that mix up above and below, and she swore this to herself so fervently that she could already see herself—if only she could hold firmly enough to her resolve—in fantasy and without physical particulars, as the mistress of the finest of all her great friend’s admirers, hers for the choosing. But since for the present there was no getting around the fact that she was still lying in Ulrich’s bed with very little on, reluctant to open her eyes, this rich sense of eager contrition, instead of developing further into a comfort to her, turned into a wretched state of exasperation.
The passion whose workings split Bonadea’s life into such opposing elements had its deepest roots not in sensuality but in ambition. Ulrich, who knew her well, thought about this but said nothing, to avoid bringing on her complaints, as he studied her face, while her eyes hid from him. The root of all her desires seemed to him a desire for distinction that had got on the wrong track, quite literally the wrong nerve track. And why shouldn’t, really, an ambition to break social records that can be celebrated with triumph, such as drinking the most beer or hanging the most diamonds on one’s neck, sometimes manifest itself, as in Bonadea’s case, as nymphomania? Now that it was over, she regretted this form of expression and wished she could undo it, he could see that; and he could also appreciate the fact that Diotima’s elaborate artificiality must impress Bonadea, whom the devil had always ridden bareback, as divine. He looked at her lidded eyeballs resting exhausted and heavy in their sockets; he saw before him her tawny nose, turned decidedly upward at the tip, with its pink, pointed nostrils; he noticed in some bewilderment the various lines of her body, its large round breasts spreading on the straight corset of her ribs, the bulbous curve of hips, the hollow sweep of the back rising from them, the hard pointed nails shielding the soft tips of the fingers. And finally, as he gazed for some time in revulsion at a few tiny hairs sprouting before his eyes from his mistress’s nostrils, he, too, wondered at recalling how his desires had been aroused only a short while ago by this person’s seductive charms. The bright, mischievous smile with which Bonadea had arrived for their “talk,” the natural ease with which she had fended off any rebukes or told the latest story about Arnheim, indeed her new, almost witty keenness of observation: she really had changed for the better; she seemed to have grown more independent, to have achieved a finer balance between the forces in her nature that pulled her up and those that pulled her down, and Ulrich found this lack of moral ponderousness particularly refreshing after his own recent bouts of seriousness. He still could feel the pleasure with which he had listened to her and watched the play of expression on her face, like sun and waves. Suddenly, while his gaze was still on Bonadea’s now sulky face, it struck him that only serious people could really be evil. “One might safely say,” he thought, “that lighthearted people are proof against wickedness. On the same principle that the villain in opera is always a bass!” Somehow this also implied an uncomfortable link in his own case between “deep” and “dark.” Guilt is certainly mitigated when incurred “lightly” by a cheerful person, but on the other hand this may apply only to love, where impassioned seducers seem to act far more destructively and unforgivably than frivolous ones, even when they are doing the same thing. So his thoughts went this way and that, and if this hour of love, so lightly begun, left him a little downhearted, it had also unexpectedly stimulated him.
So thinking, he forgot, without quite knowing how, the Bonadea who was there; resting his head on his arm, he had pensively turned his back to Bonadea and was gazing through the walls at distant things, when his total silence moved her to open her eyes. All unaware, he was at this moment remembering how he had once on a journey got off a train before reaching his destination; a translucent day that had mysteriously, seductively, swept the veils from the landscape had lured him away from the station for a walk, only to desert him at nightfall, when he found himself without his luggage in a hamlet hours away. Indeed, he seemed to recall that he had always had the quality of staying out for unpredictable lengths of time and never returning by the same road; and this suddenly brought back a far distant memory, from a period in his childhood that he normally could not recall, which cast a light on his life. Through a tiny chink in time he seemed to feel again the mysterious yearning by which a child is drawn toward some object it sees, to touch it or even put it in its mouth, at which point the magic comes to a stop as in a blind alley. Just as briefly, he regarded it as possible that the longing of adults, which drives them toward any distance merely to transform it into nearness, is no better or worse—the same sort of longing that dominated him, a compulsion, to judge by a certain aimlessness that was merely masked by curiosity; and finally, this basic image changed to
a third, emerging as this hasty and disappointing episode with Bonadea, which neither of them had wanted to turn out as it had. Lying side by side in bed seemed utterly childish to him. “But what does its opposite mean, that motionless, hushed love at a great distance, as incorporeal as an early autumn day?” he wondered. “Probably only another version of child’s play,” he thought skeptically, and remembered the colorful animal prints he had loved more rapturously as a child than he had loved his mistress today.
Bonadea at this point had seen just about enough of his back to gauge her unhappiness, and she spoke up: “It was your fault!”
Ulrich turned to her with a smile and said spontaneously: “My sister is coming here in a few days to stay with me—did I tell you? We’ll hardly be able to see each other then.”
“For how long?” Bonadea asked.
