Delta of Venus

by Anais Nin

  The witch’s shoes sounded like wooden shoes as she walked up the stairs. She had the voice of a man, and a small black rim of hair around her lips, like an adolescent’s mustache. Her voice was intense, heavy.

  She showed Elena to her room. It opened on a terrace, divided by bamboo partitions, which extended the length of the sunny side of the house, facing the lake. Elena was soon lying exposed to the sun, although she dreaded sun baths. They made her passionate and burningly aware of her whole body. She sometimes caressed herself. Now she closed her eyes and recalled scenes from Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  During the following days she took long walks. She would always be late for lunch. Then Madame Kazimir would stare at her angrily and not talk as she served her. People came every day to see Madame Kazimir about mortgage payments on the house. They threatened to sell it. It was clear that if she were deprived of her house, her protective shell, her turtle back, she would die. At the same time, she turned out guests she did not like and refused to take in men.

  Finally she surrendered at the sight of a family – husband, wife, and a little girl – who arrived one morning straight from the train, captivated by the fantastic appearance of Casutza. Before long they were sitting on the porch next to Elena’s and eating their breakfast in the sun.

  One day Elena met the man, walking alone up toward the peak of the mountain behind the chalet. He walked fast, smiled at her as he passed, and continued as though pursued by enemies. He had taken his shirt off to receive the rays of the sun fully. She saw a magnificent athlete’s torso already golden. His head was youthful, alert, but covered with graying hair. The eyes were not quite human. They had the fixed, hypnotic gaze of an animal tamer, something authoritative, violent. Elena had seen such an expression in the pimps who stood at the corners of the Mont-martre district, with their caps and scarves of bright colors.

  Apart from his eyes, this man was aristocratic. His movements were youthful and innocent. He swayed as he walked, as though he were a little drunk. All his strength centered in the glance he gave Elena, and then he smiled innocently, easily, and walked on. Elena was stopped by the glance and almost angered by the boldness of it. But his youthful smile dissolved the mordant effect of the eyes and left her with feelings she could not clarify. She turned back.

  When she reached Casutza, she was uneasy. She wanted to leave. The desire for flight was already asserting itself. By this she recognized that she was facing a danger. She thought of returning to Paris. In the end, she stayed.

  One day the piano, which had been growing rusty downstairs, began to pour out music. The slightly false notes sounded like the pianos of dingy little bars. Elena smiled. The stranger was amusing himself. He was, in fact, playing up to the nature of the piano, and giving it a sound quite alien to its bourgeois staleness, nothing like what had been played on it before by little Swiss girls with long braids.

  The house was suddenly gay, and Elena wanted to dance. The piano stopped, but not before winding her up like some mechanical puppet. Alone on the porch, she turned on her feet like a top. Quite unexpectedly a man’s voice very near her said, ‘There are live people in this house after all!’ and laughed.

  He was calmly looking through the bamboo slits, and she could see his figure clinging there like that of an imprisoned animal.

  ‘Won’t you come for a walk?’ he asked her. ‘I think this place is a tomb. It is the House of the Dead. Madame Kazimir is the Great Petrifier. She will make stalactites out of us. We shall be allowed one tear an hour, hanging from some cave ceiling, stalactite tears.’

  So Elena and the neighbor started out. The first thing he said was, ‘You have a habit of turning back, starting a walk and turning back. That is very bad. It is the very first of crimes against life. I believe in audacity.’

  ‘People express audacity in various ways,’ said Elena. ‘I usually turn back, as you say, and then I go home and write a book which becomes an obsession of the censors.’

  ‘That’s a misuse of natural forces,’ said the man.

  ‘But then,’ said Elena, ‘I use my book like dynamite, I place it where I want the explosion to take place, and then I blast my way through with it!’

  As she said these words an explosion took place somewhere in the mountain where a road was being made, and they laughed at the coincidence.

  ‘So you are a writer,’ he said. ‘I am a man of all trades, a painter, a writer, a musician, a vagabond. The wife and child were temporarily rented – for the sake of appearance. I was forced to use the passport of a friend. This friend was forced to lend me the wife and child. Without them I would not be here. I have a gift for irritating the French police. I have not murdered my concierge, though I should have. She has provoked me often enough. I have merely, like some other verbal revolutionaries, exalted the revolution too loudly on too many evenings at the same café, and a plainclothes man was one of my most fervent followers – follower, indeed! My best speeches are always made when I am drunk.

  ‘You were never there,’ continued the man, ‘you never go to cafés. The most haunting woman is the one we cannot find in the crowded café when we are looking for her, the one that we must hunt for, and seek out through the disguises of her stories.’

  His eyes, smiling, remained on her all the time that he talked. They were fixed on her with the exact knowledge of her evasions and elusiveness, and acted like a catalyst on her, rooting her to the spot where she stood, with the wind lifting her skirt like a ballerina’s, inflating her hair as if she would blow away in full sail. He was aware of her capacities for becoming invisible. But his strength was greater, and he could keep her rooted there as long as he wanted. Only when he turned his head away was she free again. But she was not free to escape him.

  After three hours of walking, they fell on a bed of pine needles within sight of a chalet. A pianola was playing.

  He smiled at her and said, ‘It would be a wonderful place to spend the day and night. Would you like it?’

  He let her smoke quietly, lying back on the pine needles. She did not answer. She smiled.

  Then they walked to the chalet and he asked for a meal and a room. The meal was to be brought up to the room. He gave his orders smoothly, leaving no doubt about his wishes. His decisiveness in small acts gave her the feeling that he would equally wave aside all obstacles to his greatest desires.

  She was not tempted to retrace her steps, to elude him. A feeling of exaltation was rising in her, of reaching that pinnacle of emotion which would fling her out of herself for good, which would abandon her to a stranger. She did not even know his name, nor he hers. The nakedness of his eyes on her was like a penetration. On the way upstairs, she was trembling.

  When they found themselves alone in the room with its immense, heavily carved bed, she first moved toward the balcony, and he followed her. She felt that the gesture he would make would be a possessive one, one that could not be eluded. She waited. What happened, she had not expected.

  It was not she who hesitated, but this man whose authority had brought her here. He stood before her suddenly slack, awkward, his eyes uneasy. He said with a disarming smile, ‘You must know, of course, that you are the first real woman I have ever known – a woman I could love, I have forced you here. I want to be sure that you want to be here. I …’

  At this acknowledgment of his timidity she was immensely moved by tenderness, a tenderness she had never experienced before. His strength was bowing to her, was hesitating before the fulfillment of the dream that had grown between them. The tenderness engulfed her. It was she who moved toward him and offered her mouth.

  Then he kissed her, his hands on her breasts. She felt his teeth. He kissed her neck where the veins were palpitating, and her throat, his hands around her neck as if he would separate her head from the rest of her body. She swayed with desire to be taken wholly. As he kissed her he undressed her. The clothes fell around her and they were still standing together kissing. Then without looking at her he carri
ed her to the bed, with his mouth still on her face and throat and hair.

  His caresses had a strange quality, at times soft and melting, at other times fierce, like the caresses she had expected when his eyes fixed on her, the caresses of a wild animal. There was something animal-like about his hands, which he kept spread over each part of her body, and which took her sex and hair together as if he would tear them away from the body, as if he grasped earth and grass together.

  When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body. He whispered now and then, telling her to raise her legs, as she had never done, until the knees touched her chin; he whispered to her to turn, and he spread her backside with his two hands. He rested inside of her, lay back and waited.

  Then she withdrew, half sat up, her hair wild and her eyes drugged, and through a half-mist saw him lying on his back. She slipped down in the bed until her mouth reached his penis. She began kissing all around it. He sighed. The penis shook slightly at each kiss. He was looking at her. His hand was on her head and he pressed it downward so her mouth would fall over the penis. His hand remained on her as she moved up and down and then fell, fell with a sigh of unbearable pleasure, fell on his belly and lay there, with eyes closed, tasting her joy.

  She could not look at him as he looked at her. Her eyes were blurred by the violence of her feelings. When she looked at him she was magnetically drawn again to touch his flesh, with her mouth or hands, or with her whole body. She rubbed her whole body against his, with animal luxuriance, enjoying the friction. Then she fell on her side and lay there, touching his mouth as if she were molding it over and over again, like a blind person who wants to discover the shape of the mouth, of the eyes, of the nose, to ascertain his form, the feel of his skin, the length and texture of his hair, the shape of the hair behind his ears. Her fingers were light as she did this, then suddenly they would become frenzied, press deep into the flesh and hurt him, as if violently to assure her of his reality.

  These were the external feelings of the bodies discovering each other. From so much touching they grew drugged. Their gestures were slow and dreamlike. Their hands were heavy. His mouth never closed.

  How the honey flowed from her. He dipped his fingers in it lingeringly, then his sex, then he moved her so that she lay on him, her legs thrown over his legs, and as he took her, he could see himself entering into her, and she could see him too. They saw their bodies undulate together, seeking their climax. He was waiting for her, watching her movements.

  Because she did not quicken her movements, he changed her position, making her lie back. He crouched over so that he could take her with more force, touching the very bottom of her womb, touching the very flesh walls again and again, and then she experienced the sensation that within her womb some new cells awakened, new fingers, new mouths, that they responded to his entrance and joined in the rhythmic motion, that this suction was becoming gradually more and more pleasurable, as if the friction had aroused new layers of enjoyment. She moved quicker to bring the climax, and when he saw this, he hastened his motions inside of her and incited her to come with him, with words, with his hands caressing her, and finally with his mouth soldered to hers, so that the tongues moved in the same rhythm as the womb and penis, and the climax was spreading between her mouth and her sex, in cross-currents of increasing pleasure, until she cried out, half sob and half laughter, from the overflow of joy through her body.

  When Elena returned to Casutza, Madame Kazimir refused to speak to her. She carried her stormy condemnation about silently but so intensely that it could be felt all through the house.

  Elena postponed her return to Paris. Pierre could not return. They met every day, sometimes staying the whole night away from Casutza. The dream continued unbroken for ten days, until a woman came to call. It was an evening when Elena and Pierre were away. His wife received her. They locked themselves up together. Madame Kazimir tried to listen to what they said but they caught sight of her head at one of the little windows.

  The woman was Russian. She was unusually beautiful, with violet eyes and dark hair, an Egyptian cast of features. She did not talk very much. She appeared greatly disturbed. When Pierre arrived in the morning he found her there. He was quite evidently surprised. Elena received a shock of inexplicable anxiety. She feared the woman immediately. She sensed danger for her love. Yet when Pierre met her hours later, he explained it all on the basis of his work. The woman had been sent with orders. He was to move on. He was given work to do in Geneva. He had been rescued from the complications in Paris with the understanding that he was to obey orders from then on. He did not say to Elena, ‘Come with me to Geneva.’ She waited for his words.

  ‘How long will you be away?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you going with … ?’ She could not even repeat her name.

  ‘Yes, she is in charge.’

  ‘If I am not to see you any more, Pierre, tell me at least, the truth.’

  But neither his expression nor his words seemed to come from the man she knew intimately. He seemed to be saying what he had been made to say, nothing more. He had lost all his personal authority. He was talking as if someone else were listening to him. Elena was silent. Then Pierre approached her and whispered, ‘I am not in love with any woman. I never have been. I am in love with my work. With you I was in great danger. Because we could talk together, because we were so near each other in so many ways, I stayed with you too long. I forgot my work.’

  Elena was to repeat these words to herself over and over again. She remembered his face as he talked, his eyes no longer fixed on her with obsessional concentration, but like those of a man obeying orders, not the laws of desire and love.

  Pierre, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.

  She never questioned Pierre’s words or considered pursuing him. She left Casutza before he did. On the train she recalled his face as it had been, so open, commanding, yet somewhere, vulnerable and yielding too.

  The most terrifying aspect of her feelings was that she was unable to shrink back as before, to shut out the world, to become deaf, colorblind, and to throw herself into some long-drawn-out fantasy, which she had done as a girl to replace reality. She was obsessed with concern for his safety, with anxiety over the dangerous life he led; she realized that he had not only penetrated her body but also her very being. Whenever she thought of his skin, his hair where the sun had bleached it a fine gold, his steady green eyes, flickering only at the moment when he bent over her to take her mouth between his strong lips, then her flesh vibrated, still responded to the image, and she was tortured.

  After hours of a pain so vivid and strong that she thought it would shatter her completely, she fell into a strange state of lethargy, a half-sleep. It was as if something had broken inside of her. She ceased to feel pain or pleasure. She was numb. The entire trip became unreal. Her body was dead again.

  After eight years of separation, Miguel had come to Paris. Miguel had come but was not bringing Elena any joy or relief, for he himself was the very symbol of her first defeat. Miguel was her first love.

  When she first met him they were mere children, two cousins lost at a huge family dinner of many cousins and aunts and uncles. Miguel had been drawn to Elena magnetically, following her like a shadow, listening to her every word, words no one could hear, her voice was so small and transparent.

  He wrote her letters from that day on, came to see her now and then during school holidays – a r
omantic attachment, in which each one used the other as the embodiment of the legend or story or novel they had read. Elena was every heroine; Miguel was every hero.

  When they met, they were enveloped in so much unreality that they could not touch each other. They did not even hold hands. They were exalted in each other’s presence, they soared together, they were moved by the same sensations. She was the first to experience a deeper emotion.

  They went to a dance together, unaware of their beauty. Other people were. Elena saw all the other young girls stare at Miguel and try to attract his attention.

  Then she saw him objectively, outside of this warm devotion in which she had enveloped him. He stood a few yards away, a very tall and lithe young man, his movements easy, graceful and strong, his muscles and nerves like those of a leopard, with a gliding walk but in readiness to spring. His eyes were leaf-green, fluid. His skin was luminous, a mysterious sun glow shining through it, like that of some phosphorescent undersea animal. His mouth was full, with a look of sensual hunger in it, with the perfect teeth of a predatory animal.

  And for the first time he saw her outside of the legend in which he had enveloped her, saw her pursued by every man, her body never static, always poised in movement, light on its feet, supple, almost evanescent, tantalizing. The quality which set everyone to hunt her down was something in her that was violently sensual, alive, earthy; her full mouth was all the more vivid because of the delicate body that moved with the fragility of tulle.

  This mouth, embedded in a face from another world, out of which came a voice which touched the soul directly, so lured Miguel that he would not let other boys dance with her. At the same time no part of his body touched her except when they danced. Her eyes drew him into her, and into worlds where he was numb, like a drugged person.

  But she, as she danced with him, had become aware of her body, as if it had suddenly turned to flesh – ignited flesh, into which each motion of the dance threw a flame. She wanted to fall forward into the flesh of his mouth, abandon herself to a mysterious drunkenness.