Delta of Venus

by Anais Nin

  She wanted to talk to someone. She saw that she was quite near to Miguel’s studio. Miguel was asleep with Donald. She woke him and sat at the foot of the bed. She talked. Miguel could barely understand her. He thought she was drunk.

  ‘Why is my love for Pierre not strong enough to keep me from this?’ she kept repeating. ‘Why is it throwing me into other loves? And loves for a woman? Why?’

  Miguel smiled. ‘Why are you so afraid of a little detour? It’s nothing. It will pass. Pierre’s love has awakened your real nature. You’re too full of love, you will love many people.’

  ‘I don’t want to, Miguel. I want to be whole.’

  ‘That’s not such a great infidelity, Elena. In another woman you’re only seeking yourself.’

  From Miguel’s she went home, bathed and rested and went to Pierre. Pierre was in a tender mood. So tender he lulled her doubts and secret anguish, and she fell asleep in his arms.

  Leila waited for her in vain. For two or three days Elena hid from thoughts of her, winning from Pierre greater proofs of love, seeking to be encircled, protected from wandering away from him.

  He was quick to observe her distress. Almost by instinct, he held her back when she wanted to leave earlier, prevented her physically from going anywhere. Then with Kay, Elena met a sculptor, Jean. His face was soft, feminine, appealing. But he was a lover of women. Elena was on the defensive. He asked for her address. When he came to see her she talked volubly against intimacy.

  He said, ‘I would like something lovelier and warmer.’

  She was frightened. She became even more impersonal. They were both uneasy. She thought: Now it is spoiled. He will not return. And she regretted it. There was an obscure attraction. She could not define it.

  He wrote her a letter: ‘When I left you, I felt newborn, cleansed of all falsities. How did you give birth to a new self without even wanting to? I will tell you what happened to me once. I stood on the corner of a street in London looking at the moon. I looked so persistently at it that it hypnotized me. I do not remember how I got home, hours and hours later. I always felt that during that time I had lost my soul to the moon. That is what you did to me, in that visit.’

  As she read this she became vividly aware of his chanting voice, his charm. He sent other letters with pieces of rock crystal, with an Egyptian scarab. She left them unanswered.

  She felt his attraction, but the night she spent with Leila had given her a strange fear. She had returned to Pierre that day feeling as if she were returning from a long trip and had been estranged from him. Each bond had to be renewed. It was this separateness she feared, the distance that it created between her deep love and herself.

  Jean waited for her at the door of her house one day and caught her as she walked out, trembling, pale with excitement, unable to sleep. She was angry that he had the power to unnerve her.

  By a coincidence, which he observed, they were both dressed in white. The summer enveloped them. His face was soft, and the emotional upheaval in his eyes enmeshed her. He had the laughter of a child, full of candor. She felt Pierre inside of her, clutching at her, holding her back. She closed her eyes so as not to see his. She thought she might be suffering merely from contagion, the contagion of his fervor.

  They sat at a humble café table. The waitress spilled the vermouth. Annoyed, he demanded that the table be wiped, as if Elena were a princess.

  Elena said, ‘I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.’

  But she saw in his eyes that she had already hurt him. He walked stubbornly beside her, almost to the very door of Pierre’s apartment house.

  She found him with a ravaged face. He had seen them in the street, had followed them from the little café. He had watched every gesture and expression that had passed between them. He said, ‘There were quite a few emotional gestures between you.’

  He was like a wild animal, his hair falling over his forehead, his eyes haggard. For an hour he was dark, beside himself with anger and doubt. She pleaded, pleaded with love, took his head and laid it on her breast, lulling him. Out of sheer exhaustion he fell asleep. She then slid out of the bed and stood by his window. The charm of the sculptor had faded. Everything faded beside the depth of Pierre’s jealousy. She thought of Pierre’s flesh, his flavor, the love they had, and at the same time she heard Jean’s adolescent laughter, trusting, sensitive, and she saw the potent charm of Leila.

  She was afraid. She was afraid because she was no longer securely tied to Pierre but to an unknown woman lying down, yielding, open, spreading.

  Pierre awakened. He stretched out his arms and said, ‘It is over now.’

  Then she wept. She wanted to beg him to keep her imprisoned, to let no one lure her away. They kissed passionately. He answered her desire by locking her in his arms with such a force that her bones cracked. She laughed and said, ‘You’re suffocating me.’ She lay dissolved, then, by a maternal feeling, a feeling that she wanted to protect him from pain; he, on the other hand, seemed. to feel he could possess her once and for all. His jealousy incited him to a kind of fury. The sap rose in him with such vigor that he did not wait for her pleasure. And she did not want this pleasure. She felt herself as a mother receiving a child into herself, drawing him in to lull him, to protect him. She felt no sexual urge but the urge to open, to receive, to enfold only.

  On days when she found Pierre weak, passive, uncertain, his body lax, eluding even the effort of dressing, of walking out into the street, then she felt herself incisive, active. She had strange feelings when they fell asleep together. In sleep he seemed vulnerable. She felt her strength aroused. She wanted then to enter him, like a man, take possession of him. She wanted to penetrate him with knifelike thrusts. She lay between sleep and wakefulness, identified with his virility, imagined herself becoming him and taking him as he took her.

  And then, at other times, she fell back, became herself – sea and sand and moisture, and no embrace then seemed violent enough, brutal enough, bestial enough.

  But if after Pierre’s jealousy their lovemaking was more violent, at the same time the air was dense; their feelings were in tumult; there was hostility, confusion, pain. Elena did not know whether their love had grown a root or absorbed a poison that would hasten its decay.

  Was there an obscure joy in this that she missed, as she missed so many morbid, masochistic tastes other people had for defeat, misery, poverty, humiliation, entanglements, failures? Pierre had said once, ‘What I remember most are the great pains of my life. The pleasant moments I have forgotten.’

  Then Kay came to see Elena, a newborn Kay, glittering. Her air of living among many lovers was finally a reality. She had come to tell Elena how she had balanced her life between her hasty lover and a woman. They sat on Elena’s bed, smoking, talking.

  Kay said, ‘You know the woman. It’s Leila.’

  Elena could not help thinking: So Leila loves a little woman again. Will she never love an equal? Someone as strong as she? She was wounded with jealousy. She wanted to be in Kay’s place being loved by Leila.

  She asked, ‘What is it like to be loved by Leila?’

  ‘It’s incredibly marvelous, Elena. Something incredible. In the first place, she always knows what one wants, what mood I’m in, what I desire. She is always accurate. She looks at me when we meet and she knows. To make love she takes so much time. She locks one up in some marvelous place – it must be a marvelous place first of all, she says. Once we were driven to use a hotel room, because Mary was staying in her apartment. The lamp was too strong. She covered it with her underwear. She makes love to the breasts first. We stay for hours merely kissing. She waits until we are drunk with kissing. She wants all our clothes removed, and then we lie glued together, rolling over each other, still kissing. She sits over me as if she were on horseback and then moves against me, rubbing. She does
not let me come for a long time. Until it becomes excruciating. Such long, drawn-out lovemaking, Elena. It leaves you tingling, it leaves you wanting more.’

  After a while she added, ‘We talked about you. She wanted to know about your love life. I told her you were obsessed with Pierre.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said she had never known Pierre to be anything but the lover of women like the prostitute Bijou.’

  ‘Pierre loved Bijou?’

  ‘Oh, for a few days.’

  The image of Pierre making love to the celebrated Bijou effaced the image of Leila making love to Kay. It was a day of jealousies. Was love to become one long train of jealousies?

  Every day Kay brought new details. Elena could not refuse to hear them. All through them, she hated Kay’s femininity and she loved Leila’s masculinity. She divined Leila’s struggle to be fulfilled and her defeat. She saw Leila donning her man’s silk shirt and silver cuff links. She wanted to ask Kay what her underwear was like. She wanted to see Leila dressing.

  It seemed to Elena that, just as the passive homosexual male became a caricature of a woman for the active male homosexual, women who submitted to dominant Lesbian love became a caricature of women’s pettiest qualities. Kay was showing this, exaggerating her whims – loving herself through Leila, really. Tormenting Leila, too, as she would not have dared torment a man. Feeling that the woman in Leila would be indulgent.

  Elena was sure that Leila was suffering from the mediocrity of the women she could make love to. The relationship could never be magnificent enough, with its taint of infantilism. Kay would arrive, eating candy out of her pocket like a schoolgirl. She pouted. She hesitated at a restaurant before ordering, and then changed her order, to play the cabotine, the woman with irresistible caprices. Soon Elena began to elude her. She began to understand the tragedy behind all Leila’s affairs. Leila had acquired a new sex by growing beyond man and woman. She thought of Leila as a mythic figure, enlarged, magnified. Leila haunted her.

  Led by an obscure intuition, she decided to go to an English tearoom above a book shop on the Rue de Rivoli, where homosexuals and Lesbians liked to congregate. They sat in separate groups. Solitary middle-aged men looked for young boys; mature Lesbians were seeking young women. The light was dim, the tea fragrant, the cake properly decadent.

  As Elena entered she saw Miguel and Donald sitting together and joined them. Donald was intent upon his whore role. He liked to show Miguel how he could attract men, how he could easily be paid for his favors. He was excited because a gray-haired Englishman of great distinction, a man who was known to pay sumptuously for his pleasures, stared at him. Donald spread his charms before him, giving oblique glances like the glances of a woman behind a veil. Miguel was half-angry. He said, ‘If you only knew what this man requires of his boys, you would stop flirting with him.’

  ‘What?’ asked Donald, with a morbid curiosity.

  ‘Do you really want me to tell you?’

  ‘Yes. I want to know.’

  ‘He only wants boys to lie under him while he crouches over their faces, and covers their face with – you can guess what.’

  Donald made a grimace and looked at the gray-haired man.

  He could hardly believe this, seeing the man’s aristocratic bearing, the fineness of his features. Seeing how delicately he held his cigarette holder, the dreamy and romantic expression of his eyes. How could this man actually perform such an act? This ended Donald’s provoking coquetries.

  Then Leila came in, saw Elena and came to their table. She knew Miguel and Donald. She loved Donald’s peacock travesties – the spreading of imaginary colors, plumes one did not possess; without the colored hair, colored eyelashes, colored nails, that women had. She laughed with Donald, admired Miguel’s grace, then turned to Elena and plunged her dark eyes into Elena’s very green ones.

  ‘How is Pierre? Why don’t you bring him to the studio some time? I go there every evening before I sing. You never have come to hear me sing. I am at the nightclub every night about eleven.’

  Later she offered: ‘Will you let me drive you where you are going?’

  They left together and got into the back seat of Leila’s black limousine. Leila leaned over Elena and covered her mouth with her own full lips in one interminable kiss in which Elena nearly lost consciousness. Their hats fell off as they threw their heads back against the seats. Leila engulfed her. Elena’s mouth fell on Leila’s throat, in the slit of her black dress, which was open between the breasts. She only had to push the silk away with her mouth to feel the beginning of the breasts.

  ‘Are you going to elude me again?’ asked Leila.

  Elena pressed her fingers against the silk-covered hips, feeling the richness of the hips, the fullness of the thighs, caressing her. The tantalizing smoothness of the skin and the silk of the dress melted into one another. She felt the little prominence of the garter. She wanted to push open Leila’s knees, right there. Leila gave an order to the chauffeur Elena did not hear. The car changed direction. ‘This is an abduction,’ said Leila, laughing deeply.

  Hatless, hair flying, they entered her darkened apartment, where the blinds were drawn against the summer heat. Leila led Elena by the hand to her bedroom and they fell on the luxuriant bed together. Silk again, silk under the fingers, silk between the legs, silky shoulders, neck, hair. Lips of silk trembling under the fingers. It was like the night at the opium den; the caresses lengthened, the suspense was preciously sustained. Each time they approached the orgasm, either Leila or Elena, observing the quickening of the motion, took up the kissing again – a bath of lovemaking, such as one might have in an endless dream, the moisture creating little sounds of rain between the kisses. Leila’s finger was firm, commanding, like a penis; her tongue, far-reaching, knowing so many nooks where it stirred the nerves.

  Instead of having one sexual core, Elena’s body seemed to have a million sexual openings, equally sensitized, every cell of the skin magnified with the sensibility of a mouth. The very flesh of her arm suddenly opened and contracted with the passage of Leila’s tongue or fingers. She moaned, and Leila bit into the flesh, as if to arouse a greater moan. Her tongue between Elena’s legs was like a stabbing, agile and sharp. When the orgasm came, it was so vibrant that it shook their bodies from head to foot.

  Elena dreamed of Pierre and Bijou. The full-fleshed Bijou, the whore, the animal, the lioness; a luxuriant goddess of abundance, her flesh a bed of sensuality – every pore and curve of her. In the dream her hands were grasping, her flesh throbbed in a mountainous, heaving way, fermenting, saturated with moisture, folded into many voluptuous layers. Bijou was always prone, inert, awakening only for the moment of love. All the fluids of desire seeping along the silver shadows of her legs, around the violin-shaped hips, descending and ascending with a sound of wet silk around the hollows of her breasts.

  Elena imagined her everywhere, in the tight skirt of the streetwalker, always preying and waiting. Pierre had loved her obscene walk, her naïve glance, her drunken sullenness, her virginal voice. For a few nights he had loved that walking sex, that ambulant womb, open to all.

  And now perhaps he loved her again.

  Pierre showed Elena a photograph of his mother, the luxuriant mother. The resemblance to Bijou was startling in all but the eyes. Bijou’s were circled with mauve. Pierre’s mother had a healthier air. But the body –

  Then Elena thought, I am lost. She did not believe Pierre’s story that Bijou repulsed him now. She began to frequent the café where Bijou and Pierre had met, hoping for a discovery that would end her doubts. She discovered nothing, except that Bijou liked very young men, fresh-faced, fresh-lipped, fresh-blooded. That calmed her a little.

  While Elena sought to meet Bijou and unmask the enemy, Leila was seeking to meet Elena, with ruses.

  And the three women met, driven inside of the same café on a day of heavy rain: Leila, perfumed and dashing, carrying her head high, a silver fox stole undulating a
round her shoulders over her trim black suit; Elena, in a wine-colored velvet; and Bijou, in her streetwalker’s costume, which she could never abandon, the tight-fitting black dress and high-heeled shoes. Leila smiled at Bijou, then recognized Elena. Shivering, the three sat down before aperitifs. What Elena had not expected was to be completely intoxicated with Bijou’s voluptuous charm. On her right sat Leila, incisive, brilliant, and on her left, Bijou, like a bed of sensuality Elena wanted to fall into.

  Leila observed her and suffered. Then she set about courting Bijou, which she could do so much better than Elena. Bijou had never known women like Leila, only the women who worked with her, who, when the men were not there, indulged with Bijou in orgies of kisses, to compensate for the brutality of the men -sitting and kissing themselves into a hypnotic state, that was all.

  She was susceptible to Leila’s subtle flattery, but at the same time she was spellbound with Elena. Elena was a complete novelty for her. Elena represented to men a type of woman who was the opposite of the whore, a woman who poetized and dramatized love, mixed it with emotion, a woman who seemed made of another substance, a woman one imagined created by a legend. Yes, Bijou knew men well enough to know this was also a woman they were incited to initiate to sensuality, whom they enjoyed seeing become enslaved by sensuality. The more legendary the woman, the greater the pleasure in desecrating, eroticizing her. Deep down, she was, under all the dreaminess, another courtesan, living also for the pleasure of man.

  Bijou, who was the whore of whores, would have liked to exchange places with Elena. Whores always envy women who have the faculty of arousing desire and illusion as well as hunger. Bijou, the sex organ walking undisguised, would have liked to have the appearance of Elena. And Elena was thinking how she would have liked to change places with Bijou, for the many times when men grew tired of courting and wanted sex without it, bestial and direct. Elena pined to be raped anew each day, without regard for her feelings; Bijou pined to be idealized. Leila alone was satisfied to be born free of man’s tyranny, to be free of man. But she did not realize that imitating man was not being free of him.