A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  Fraŭlino Bernfeld shuddered.

  Her mouth again found mine, her tongue licentiously searching mine out. Our knees gave way, and we were standing upon them. I could feel her hands working frantically, and when she once again forced my head onto her breast, I was surprised to find her bodice unbuttoned. As I (quite presumptuously, I felt) licked along the line where her bare chest met the cups of her brassiere, her hands, knotted into jittery fists, pummeled my sternum as she worked to unbutton the rest of her dress’s front. Unable to wait, she yanked the two halves apart. Three buttons flew off with little percussive sounds and were lost in the sand. Kissing me still, she reached blindly across the sand for my jacket, and when she had it in her hands, she broke off from me. I looked into her eyes, questioningly. Keeping my gaze, she stood and retreated a step or two. She looked back towards the high cliffs and the little town. No one could be seen. Except for ourselves, the beach was uninhabited. While I remained on my knees, fraŭlino Bernfeld pulled her dress off her shoulders. She let the top of her corset fall and climbed into my jacket, sliding her arms into its arms. In the moonlight, I could see a brace of sand falling from its shiny black satin. Covered now with the jacket, fraŭlino Bernfeld let the top of her dress fall to her waist. She returned to me with a sultry air that was, quite frankly, alarming. Kneeling beside me, she locked her mouth onto mine and pressed her weight against me until I had no choice but to fall backwards onto the sand, moving my legs, with difficulty, from beneath me. She laughed with her lips still hard on mine, and I could feel her teeth. When I laughed in response, our teeth ground together. Her nipples emerged from beneath the lapels of my evening coat, and the black satin sliding against their extended flesh was nearly more than I could withstand. She removed whatever it was that was fastening her hair and threw it — a metallic glint in the moonlight — into the mouth of her shoe.

  She shook out her hair, the milk chocolaty tresses falling onto the shoulders of my evening coat. “Now where were we?” she said.

  “I believe I was offering to kiss you,” I said, “if, in your happiness, you still feel the need.”

  Again she knelt beside me, her skirt and long underskirt a bell of fabric surrounding her legs. With her arm on my shoulder, she distracted me with a kiss, while with her other hand she fiddled with the buttons of my braces and with those of my trousers. Stupid! I thought. You should have unbuttoned them yourself while she had moved away to retrieve your jacket! But I’d been afraid of seeming too forward, of appearing to push myself upon her. What if I were misreading her signals? She dug, like a child digging in sand, through the various fabrics of my crotch, until she found at last what had been long buried there. Almost painfully, my manhood stood, uncustomarily erect. I couldn’t help gasping out a high, helpless breathy gasp, and fraŭlino Bernfeld smiled shyly. Schooled at her father’s expense from an early age in the equestrian arts, she dispatched one leg across my supine body and straddled me before I’d completely anticipated her intentions. She settled herself upon me as though she were settling into a hot bath — slowly, degree by exquisite degree, her face contorting in a momentary grimace, until she sighed and seemed, at least provisionally, to relax. Lying on the sand, I held myself upright using my elbows as supports. Bending low, fraŭlino Bernfeld pressed her breasts against my chest, kissing me in the crook of my neck, her breath blossoming against my skin, concealing us, as it were, behind the curtain of my jacket above and of her skirts below. If we were, Heaven forbid it, espied from a distance, I’ve no doubt we would have resembled either a man in a formal jacket raping a young maiden or a sartorial hermaphrodite falling to its knees on the beach, sobbing at some unimaginable tragedy.

  Now I understood the presence of the book I’d seen her stashing so furtively inside her traveling case, Dr. Albrecht’s notorious Mysteries of Females or, The Secrets of Nature. She had wisely prepared for the moment, researching it, while I, as ignorant as I had been after my father’s frank talk, found myself still in the dark. I couldn’t even say for certain what exactly I was feeling underneath her skirts. Cobbling a mosaic out of various sculptures and monuments I’d seen in museums, stops on a recent sightseeing tour, and the collection of pornographic postcards Otto once left inside his evening coat, I tried to conjure a picture of what might be going on between the straining obelisk of my lap and the Arc du Triomphe of fraŭlino Bernfeld’s, but of the images of the female nude I kept inside my head, none were specific enough to satisfy my current needs. Everything seemed soft, wet, and enfolding, but was that simply her sweat-bedewed thigh or actually, in fact, the soft and encompassing caresses of her vulva, the thought of penetrating which was enough to prematurely release the wellsprings of my masculinity.

  I was alarmed to hear a garbled, strangled growl flying from my throat. My feet and head seemed to be pulling apart, trying to dash down the beach simultaneously in opposite directions. I may even have fainted before instantaneously coming to.

  “Oh?” fraŭlino Bernfeld said, raising herself up and looking perplexed as though, having come for the first time to the end of this sticky business, she couldn’t quite understand what had earned the enterprise its exalted reputation. Her look of confusion was immediately covered by one of benediction as she came near me and kissed my eyelids, my forehead, my nose, and finally my mouth. Groggily, I accepted and returned these kisses, feeling somewhat humiliated. One of her breasts grazed my mouth, and I tried to suckle at it sleepily, but it moved past too quickly as she stood. She turned her back and dressed. I lay in the sand and let my head fall into it. I gazed up at the stars, a galaxy of brilliant points in a black shroud. I staggered up, intuiting that it was not gentlemanly to exult in my own deliquescence while fraŭlino Bernfeld apparently could not in hers. (I’d learned enough from reading Freud to know this little.) I buttoned my pants and my braces. fraŭlino Bernfeld was once again fully clothed with my jacket over her shoulders. I walked the beach the few paces towards her and stood behind her, kissing her neck and cupping her breast in my hands. She closed her eyes and leaned against me, before removing my hands, firmly and decisively.

  Lowering her head, she covered her eyes and began to weep.

  “Ne, ne, mia karulino, ne, ne,” I said soothingly.

  I turned her around, so that she was facing me, and she collapsed against my chest. I enfolded her into my arms. I felt horrible. She had given me her maidenhood, but clearly I was the only one who had profited from the exchange, and now she was ruined. Had I forced her into this? Perhaps by withholding a marriage proposal for so long, I had driven her into degrading herself, simply to secure my attention. I never felt lower or meaner in all my days, and I recoiled against the heartless cad I’d become. A creation of my own era — who isn’t? — there was but one thing I could do.

  “Fraŭlino Bernfeld,” I said. “Loë. Ŝa, ŝa, ŝa, mia kara, mia dolĉa knabino …”

  My words, however, only seemed to make her cry harder.

  I held her by her shoulders, so that she faced me squarely. I took a breath, and at last I said the words I’d been meaning to say for so very long: “Karulino, edziniĝu al mi.”

  “Kio?”

  “Estu mia edzino. Mi petas!”

  “Ho, Kaĉjo!” She lifted both hands to my face and covered me with her soft, sweet kisses. “Jes,” she said.

  “Vere?”

  “Jes, mi diris, jes, mi volas, jes!”

  CHAPTER 10

  The rest of the congress passed in a blur. There were concerts, speeches, balls, banquets, day-trips, and performances of various plays. Dr. Zamenhof’s own translation of Molière’s Le Mariage Forcé seemed to particularly delight fraŭlino Bernfeld, although I found the depiction of Sganarelle, the reluctant bridegroom, a bit mean-spirited.

  Early on the Sunday immediately following Dr. Zamenhof’s speech, the Majstro roused me from my bed and asked me to go with him to the local church. He wished to attend a mass there. “In a spirit of openness and brotherhood,” he told me. I had little en
thusiasm for the gesture, noble though it seemed. Sore and chafed from my deflowering of fraŭlino Bernfeld, I worried that something about me, forever and irrevocably changed, would publish to the onlooking world that I was now a mad sex fiend. Staying in bed, lolling lazily in the sheets, my reserves spent and renewing, I had only to close my eyes, and I could see her again in my jacket, bearing down on me, her breasts like the mountains of a long-sought homeland coming nearer and nearer as the pilgrim returns.

  But who could refuse Dr. Zamenhof anything?

  “I didn’t bring a talis,” he fretted, as I found my clothes in the morning’s near darkness, my legs, my arms, my hips aching sumptuously. “It’s been years since I’ve had the need to don one.”

  “They’ll have them there, I suppose.”

  Apparently, however, Christians pray without the need of special garments. This was our first surprise upon entering the cathedral in the fortified old city. The second came when a man, the priest, ran up to us as we entered the narthex, his mouth bent down so violently at the corners, it resembled one of the circumflex accents Dr. Javal so worried about.

  “Your hats, gentlemen, your hats! Show some respect, please! You’re in the house of the Lord.”

  “But … but we have no other head covering,” Dr. Zamenhof explained, whispering with an air of profound embarrassment.

  “Off! Off!” the priest said, snapping his fingers. Meekly, we removed our hats. I’d never been in a church before and, of course, neither had Dr. Zamenhof. As we walked in and looked for seats, I tried to take in the sights without appearing like a novice. There were icons, paintings, figurines, statuary tacked up in every niche and on every spare inch of every wall. There were half a dozen confessionals — these reminded me of changing rooms on a beach, though built more solidly — and an odd statue of the Virgin Mother and her infant son inside a boat. The place looked like a cluttered secondhand shop, visually noisy, if not cacophonous. A small girl in a blue dress approached Dr. Zamenhof as we settled into our pew. Go away! Go away! I thought, wanting to fade anonymously into the crowd. I could sense the eyes of the entire congregation upon us, watching with interest our little dumb show. My thoughts, however, and the pleading scowl they no doubt produced on my face, had no effect upon the child as she thrust a small book at the good and now-famous Dr. Esperanto.

  “Sir, may I have your autograph, please?” she inquired sweetly.

  “Not here,” Dr. Zamenhof whispered kindly in her ear. “This place is a sacred place.”

  He arranged to meet with her outside after the service.

  “But they write on their Sabbaths,” I whispered, leaning in to him.

  His features became fixed in a look of momentary perplexity.

  “What?” he whispered back, eying me above the rims of his spectacles.

  “I said that, unlike us — although not unlike you and me — they write during their Sabbaths.”

  “Ah, yes, so they do, so they do. Of course,” he said, clucking his tongue. He twisted his neck, looking into the church behind us. “I suppose it’s too late to call her back.”

  “Yes!” I said quietly, as the priest was walking towards us again. What have we done now? What have we done now? I thought, but thankfully, he moved past us and ascended the apse.

  ON MONDAY AT 10 a.m. sharp, the first of the general meetings commenced, and the hard work of organizing an international movement began. Citing fatigue, Dr. Zamenhof turned the proceedings over to Rector Boirac as the de facto president of the congress. Firmly, but with his usual tact, Rector Boirac opened the first meeting with a discussion of Dr. Zamenhof’s Declaration of the Essentials of Esperantism, in which our Majstro laid out, in his usual clear and concise fashion, the tenets of our movement. A fundamento was established — though a liberal one, consisting of nothing more than Dr. Zamenhof’s Sixteen Rules of Grammar, the eighteen-hundred-word Universala Vortaro, and the practical Ekzecaro, or exercise book — and from this, it was declared, no one could deviate while still calling himself an Esperantist. (These texts, down to their typos, so the joke went, were to be sacrosanct.) Any other ideas or hopes linked to Esperanto by its proponents were each man’s private affair, for which Esperanto could not be held responsible.

  This became known as the Boulogne Declaration.

  Later in the week, an official language committee was proposed and voted in. There was a great deal of resistance to an international organization, however, and Dr. Zamenhof’s long-cherished hope of founding a league of Esperantists was roundly defeated.

  “It’s impossible, I suppose, to rule a group of individualists and eccentrics,” fraŭlino Bernfeld whispered to me, as we sat in on the proceedings. As always, she was correct: how does one organize a bevy of mavericks, visionaries, oddballs, loners, and utopianists? The question was even more thorny since the French had joined the fray: children of the 1870s, they’d all been schooled in the rampant individualism characteristic of their age. Still, I confess, the issues under discussion impressed me less than did the fragrance of fraŭlino Bernfeld’s perfume and the slightly wet feeling of her skin. (Though by the sea, the days at Boulogne, by noon, grew quite hot.) The two of us found every opportunity, every opening in the official schedule, to casually wander away from each other, strolling with apparent aimlessness, often in opposite directions, so that as we arrived at her suite or at my room no one might come to know of the hours we spent together in bed, refining and perfecting the activities we’d discovered a mutual interest in that night upon the beach.

  Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s bed became a garden of delights, a haven of long, languid afternoons with the cool sea light frizzling in through the gauze of her drawn curtains. Focusing our attentions exclusively upon each other, we were only dimly aware of the shadows that fell across us, crossing the bed and the floor, climbing the wall, circumnavigating the room like the gnomon of a sundial, as days passed in this fashion. While others’ often booming voices filtered through the open window from the square below, we spoke only in whispers and half phrases. Everything was succulent and wet. Beads of perspiration fell from my nose onto fraŭlino Bernfeld’s breast beneath me. The valley of her neck, where I planted my kisses, was slick. Our arms were slathered, our hair moist and dripping. As the hours ran down and the time for emerging again into the congress drew near, we finished our slow, bleary, convulsive lovemaking with climaxes that were but anticlimaxes, so rich and deliriant had been everything preceding them. Indeed, there was something disappointing about finally uncoiling the tensed spirals of the kundalinic snakes curling deep inside our groins, as doing so meant a cessation of the forever forward motion of unconcluded desire. Afterwards, we bathed, like children, in the tub, fraŭlino Bernfeld sitting and I lying with my legs around her hips, or I sitting and she holding me in the brace of her long, smooth legs.

  Much, of course, had been said throughout the congress on the now-proven utility of Esperanto. The language was flexible, pliant enough for every use from casual conversation to the ordering of a drink in a bar; one could give a speech in it or run a meeting with it or employ it in the highest of literary endeavors. I can attest, however, as could fraŭlino Bernfeld, that the international language is suited, as well, for the manifold uses of love. As we had, in Berlin before boarding the train to Paris, agreed henceforth to speak only in the international tongue with each other, we made no exceptions, whispering words of passion, in the exquisite privacy of our bedchambers:

  “Via buŝo je la ektuŝo donacas tute jam sian molecon de veluro!”

  “Ho! Mia amanto, mi ludos viran rolon kun plezuro, rajdonte vin kun arta kokso-lulo!”

  “Dum inter viajn du fermurojn, mia kara, premiĝos mia kapo kaj mia lango vibros kun fervoro!”

  Sed, sufiĉe, leganto, mi estas maldiskreta kaj ĉi tiuj aĵoj estas neniom da via afero, vere!

  Exhausted and enthralled, by the last hours of the congress, I felt drained, emptied, tapped, but deliriously happy. My lower limbs were as rubbery as a trio of
garden hoses, and it was soon sufficient to merely see fraŭlino Loë or to fall asleep near her in the afternoon or to catch sight of her talking, across the room, in a passionate debate. I had, I thought, no further need to touch her or to kiss her or to stroke her so that the sweet waters of her desire welled up for me, until in fact, I did touch her or kiss her or stroke her, and then I was on fire for her again. In public, we made our plans and parted as abruptly, as coolly as possible, meeting at her door or at mine or, as our desire grew too insistent, in the servants’ stairwell or in the laundry room, bribing this laundry maid or that steward to lock the door and look the other way, so that, at the last moment of the congress, after the group of delegates had been photographed in impressive rows upon the hotel lawn, when every man threw his hat into the air and, with a crying hullabaloo, shouted out, Vivu Esperanto! Vivu Zamenhof! Vivu Michaux! I, standing among them, added my own vivuojn — Vivu fraŭlino Loë! Vivu Amo! Vivu Sekso! — before searching with the other men among the earth-downed hats for my cherished square-crowned derby.