Delta of Venus

by Anais Nin

  She paid her court suavely, flatteringly, to the whore of whores. As none of the three women abdicated, they finally walked out together. Leila invited Elena and Bijou to her apartment.

  When they arrived, it was scented with burning incense. The only light came from illuminated glass globes filled with water and iridescent fish, corals and glass sea horses. This gave the room an undersea aspect, the appearance of a dream, a place where three diversely beautiful women exhaled such sensual auras that a man would have been overcome.

  Bijou was afraid to move. Everything looked so fragile to her. She sat cross-legged like an Arab woman, smoking. Elena seemed to radiate light like the glass globes. Her eyes shone brilliant and feverish in the semidarkness. Leila emitted a mysterious charm for both women, an atmosphere of the unknown.

  The three of them sat on the very low couch, on a heaving sea of pillows. The first one to move was Leila, who slid her jeweled hand under Bijou’s skirts and gasped slightly with surprise at the unexpected touch of flesh where she had expected to find silky underwear. Bijou lay back and turned her mouth toward Elena, her strength tempted by the fragility of Elena, knowing for the first time what it was to feel like a man and to feel a woman’s slightness bending under the weight of a mouth, the small head bent back by her heavy hands, the light hair flying about. Bijou’s strong hands encircled the dainty neck with delight. She held the head like a cup between her hands to drink from the mouth long draughts of nectar breath, her tongue undulating.

  Leila had a moment of jealousy. Each caress she gave to Bijou, Bijou transmitted to Elena – the very same caress. After Leila kissed Bijou’s luxuriant mouth, Bijou took Elena’s lips between hers. When Leila’s hand slipped further under Bijou’s dress, Bijou slid her hand under Elena’s. Elena did not move, filling herself with languor. Then Leila slid to her knees and used both hands to stroke Bijou. When she pushed up Bijou’s dress, Bijou threw her body back and closed her eyes to better feel the movements of the warm, incisive hands. Elena, seeing Bijou offered, dared to touch her voluptuous body and follow every contour of the rich curves – a bed of down, soft, firm flesh without bones, smelling of sandal-wood and musk. Her own nipples hardened as she touched Bijou’s breasts. When her hand passed around Bijou’s buttocks, it met Leila’s hand.

  Then Leila began to undress, exposing a soft little black satin corselet, which held her stockings with tiny black garters. Her thighs, slender and white, gleamed, her sex lay in shadow. Elena loosened the garters to watch the polished legs emerging. Bijou threw her dress over her head and then leaned forward to finish pulling it off, exposing as she did so the fullness of her buttocks, the dimples at the bottom of the spine, the incurving back. Then Elena slid out of her dress. She was wearing black lace underwear that was slit open back and front, showing only the shadowy folds of her sexual secrets.

  Under their feet was a big white fur. They fell on this, the three bodies in accord, moving against each other to feel breast against breast and belly against belly. They ceased to be three bodies. They became all mouths and fingers and tongues and senses. Their mouths sought another mouth, a nipple, a clitoris. They lay entangled, moving very slowly. They kissed until the kissing became a torture and the body grew restless. Their hands always found yielding flesh, an opening. The fur they lay on gave off an animal odor, which mingled with the odors of sex.

  Elena sought the fuller body of Bijou. Leila was more aggressive. She had Bijou lying on her side, with one leg thrown over Leila’s shoulder, and she was kissing Bijou between the legs. Now and then Bijou jerked backward, away from the stinging kisses and bites, the tongue that was as hard as a man’s sex.

  When she moved thus, her buttocks were thrown fully against Elena’s face. With her hands Elena had been enjoying the shape of them, and now she inserted her finger into the tight little aperture. There she could feel every contraction caused by Leila’s kisses, as if she were touching the wall against which Leila moved her tongue. Bijou, withdrawing from the tongue that searched her, moved into a finger which gave her joy. Her pleasure was expressed in melodious ripples of her voice, and now and then, like a savage being taunted, she bared her teeth and tried to bite the one who was tantalizing her.

  When she was about to come and could no longer defend herself against her pleasure, Leila stopped kissing her, leaving Bijou halfway on the peak of an excruciating sensation, half-crazed. Elena had stopped at the same moment.

  Uncontrollable now, like some magnificent maniac, Bijou threw herself over Elena’s body, parted her legs, placed herself between them, glued her sex to Elena’s, and moved, moved with desperation. Like a man now, she thumped against Elena, to feel the two sexes meeting, soldering. Then as she felt her pleasure coming she stopped herself, to prolong it, fell backward and opened her mouth to Leila’s breast, to burning nipples that were seeking to be caressed.

  Elena was now also in the frenzy before orgasm. She felt a hand under her, a hand she could rub against. She wanted to throw herself on this hand until it made her come, but she also wanted to prolong her pleasure. And she ceased moving. The hand pursued her. She stood up, and the hand again traveled toward her sex. Then she felt Bijou standing against her back, panting. She felt the pointed breasts, the brushing of Bijou’s sexual hair against her buttocks. Bijou rubbed against her, and then slid up and down, slowly, knowing the friction would force Elena to turn so as to feel this on her breasts, sex and belly. Hands, hands everywhere at once. Leila’s pointed nails buried in the softest part of Elena’s shoulder, between her breast and underarm, hurting, a delicious pain, the tigress taking hold of her, mangling her. Elena’s body so burning hot that she feared one more touch would set off the explosion. Leila sensed this, and they separated.

  All three of them fell on the couch. They ceased touching and looked at each other, admiring their disorder, and seeing the moisture glistening along their beautiful legs.

  But they could not keep their hands away from each other, and now Elena and Leila together attacked Bijou, intent on drawing from her the ultimate sensation. Bijou was surrounded, enveloped, covered, licked, kissed, bitten, rolled again on the fur rug, tormented with a million hands and tongues. She was begging now to be satisfied, spread her legs, sought to satisfy herself by friction against the others’ bodies. They would not let her. With tongues and fingers they pried into her, back and front, sometimes stopping to touch each other’s tongue – Elena and Leila, mouth to mouth, tongues curled together, over Bijou’s spread legs. Bijou raised herself to receive a kiss that would end her suspense. Elena and Leila, forgetting her, concentrated all their feelings in their tongues, flicking at each other. Bijou, impatient, madly aroused, began to stroke herself, then Leila and Elena pushed her hand away and fell upon her. Bijou’s orgasm came like an exquisite torment. At each spasm she moved as if she were being stabbed. She almost cried to have it end.

  Over her prone body, Elena and Leila took up their tongue-kissing again, hands drunkenly searching each other, penetrating everywhere, until Elena cried out. Leila’s fingers had found her rhythm, and Elena clung to her, waiting for the pleasure to burst, while her own hands sought to give Leila the same pleasure. They tried to come in unison, but Elena came first, falling in a heap, detached from Leila’s hand, struck down by the violence of her orgasm. Leila fell beside her, offering her sex to Elena’s mouth. As Elena’s pleasure grew fainter, rolling away, dying off, she gave Leila her tongue, flicking in the sex’s mouth until Leila contracted and moaned. She bit into Leila’s tender flesh. In the paroxysm of her pleasure, Leila did not feel the teeth buried there.

  Elena now understood why some Spanish husbands refused to initiate their wives to all the possibilities of lovemaking – to avoid the risk of awakening in them an insatiable passion. Instead of being contented, calmed by Pierre’s love, she had become more vulnerable. The more she desired Pierre, the greater her hunger for other loves. It seemed to her that she had little interest in the rooting of love, in its fixity. She w
anted only the moment of passion from everyone.

  She did not even want to see Leila again. She wanted to see the sculptor Jean because he was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt. She thought to herself: I talk almost like a saint, to burn for love – for no mystic love, but for a ravaging sensual meeting. Pierre has awakened in me a woman I did not know, an insatiable woman.

  Almost as if she had willed her desire to accomplish itself, she found Jean waiting at the door. He was, as usual, carrying some little offering in a package, which he held awkwardly. The way his body moved, the way his eyes trembled when she approached him, betrayed the strength of his desire. She was already possessed by his body, and he moved as if he were installed within her.

  ‘You have never come to see me,’ he said humbly. ‘You have never seen my work.’

  ‘Let’s go now,’ she answered, and with a light, dancing step, she walked at his side. They reached a curious, barren part of Paris, near one of the gates, a city of sheds turned into studios, side by side with workmen’s homes. And there Jean lived with statues in place of furniture, massive statues. He himself was fluid, changeable, hypersensitive, and he had created a solidity and power with his trembling hands.

  The sculptures were like monuments, five times life size, the women pregnant, the men indolent and sensual, with hands and feet like tree roots. One man and woman were so kneaded together that one could not detect the differences between their bodies. The contours were completely welded together. Bound by their genitals, they towered over Elena and Jean.

  In the shadow of this statue, they moved toward each other, without a word, without a smile. Even their heads did not move. As they met, Jean pressed Elena against the statue. They did not kiss or touch each other with their hands. Only their torsos met, repeating in warm human flesh the welding of the bodies of the statue above them. He pressed his genitals against hers, with a low, entranced rhythm, as if he would thus enter her body.

  He slid down, as if he were going to kneel at her feet, only to rise again, this time carrying her dress upward under his pressure, so that it ended in a swollen heap of material under her arms. And again he pressed against her, sometimes moving from left to right or right to left, sometimes in circles, sometimes pushing into her with compressed violence. She felt the bulk of his desire rubbing as if he were lighting a fire with two stones, drawing sparks each time he moved, and finally she slid downwards as if in a light-bodied dream. She fell in a heap, caught between his legs, and now he wanted to fix this position, to eternalize it, to nail down her body with the powerful thrust of his swollen virility. They moved again, she to offer the deepest recesses of her femininity, and he to bind them together. She contracted to feel his presence more, moving with a gasp of unbearable joy, as if she had touched the most vulnerable point of his being.

  He closed his eyes to feel this elongation of his being into which all his blood had concentrated and which lay in the voluptuous darkness of her. He could no longer hold back and pushed out to invade her, to fill her womb to the brim with his blood, and as she received this, the little passageway where he moved closed tighter around him, swallowing the essences of his being within her.

  The statue cast its shadow over their embrace, which did not dissolve. They lay as if turned to stone, feeling the very last drop of pleasure ebbing away. She was already thinking of Pierre. She knew she would not return to Jean. She thought: Tomorrow it would be less beautiful. She thought with an almost superstitious fear that if she stayed with Jean, then Pierre would sense the betrayal and punish her.

  She expected to be punished. As she stood before Pierre’s door she expected to find Bijou there on his bed, her legs wide apart. Why Bijou? Because Elena expected revenge for the betrayal of her love.

  Her heart beat wildly as he opened the door. Pierre smiled innocently. But then, was not her smile innocent? To ascertain this, she looked at herself in the mirror. Had she expected the demon driving her to appear in her green eyes?

  She observed the creases in her skirt, the specks of dust on her sandals. She felt that Pierre would know, if he made love to her, that it was Jean’s essence which flowed together with her own moisture. She eluded his caresses and suggested they visit Balzac’s house in Passy.

  It was a soft rainy afternoon, with that gray Parisian melancholy that drove people indoors, that created an erotic atmosphere because it fell like a ceiling over the city, enclosing them all in a nerveless air, as in an alcove; and everywhere, some reminder of the erotic life – a shop, half-hidden, showing underwear and black garters and black boots; the Parisian woman’s provocative walk; taxis carrying embracing lovers.

  Balzac’s house stood at the top of a hilly street in Passy, overlooking the Seine. First they had to ring at the door of an apartment house, then descend a flight of stairs that seemed to lead to a cellar but opened instead on a garden. Then they had to traverse the garden and ring at another door. This was the door of his house, concealed in the garden of the apartment house, a secret and mysterious house, so hidden and isolated in the heart of Paris.

  The woman who opened the door was like a ghost from the past – faded face, faded hair and clothes, bloodless. Living with Balzac’s manuscripts, pictures, engravings of the women he had loved, first editions, she was permeated with a vanished past, and all the blood had ebbed from her. Her very voice was distant, ghostly. She slept in this house filled with dead souvenirs. She had become equally dead to the present. It was as if each night she laid herself away in the tomb of Balzac, to sleep with him.

  She guided them through the rooms, and then to the back of the house. She came to a trap door, slipped her long bony fingers through the ring and lifted it for Elena and Pierre to see. It opened on a little stairway.

  This was the trap door Balzac had built so that the women who visited him could escape from the surveillance or suspicions of their husbands. He, too, used it to escape from his harassing creditors. The stairway led to a path and then to a gate that opened on an isolated street that in turn led to the Seine. One could escape before the person at the front door of the house had enough time to traverse the first room.

  For Elena and Pierre, the effect of this trap door so evoked Balzac’s love of life that it affected them like an aphrodisiac. Pierre whispered to her, ‘I would like to take you on the floor, right here.’

  The ghost woman did not hear these words, uttered with the directness of an apache, but she caught the glance which accompanied them. The mood of the visitors was not in harmony with the sacredness of the place, and she hurried them out.

  The breath of death had whipped their senses. Pierre hailed a taxi. In the taxi he could not wait. He made Elena sit over him, with her back to him, the whole length of her body against his, concealing him completely. He raised her skirt.

  Elena said, ‘Not here, Pierre. Wait until we get home. People will see us. Please wait. Oh, Pierre, you’re hurting me! Look, the policeman stared at us. And now we’re stopped here, and people can see us from the sidewalk. Pierre, Pierre, stop it.’

  But all the time that she feebly defended herself, and tried to slip off, she was conquered by pleasure. Her efforts to sit still made her even more keenly aware of Pierre’s every movement. Now she feared that he might hurry his act, driven by the speed of the taxi and the fear that it would stop soon in front of the house and the taxi driver would turn his head toward them. And she wanted to enjoy Pierre, to reassert their bond, the harmony of their bodies. They were observed from the street. Yet she could not draw away, and he now had his arms around her. Then a violent jump of the taxi over a hole in the road threw them apart. It was too late to resume the embrace. The taxi had stopped. Pierre had just enough time to button himself. Elena felt they must look drunk, disheveled. The languor of her body made it difficult for her to move.

  Pierre was filled with a perverse enjoyment of this interruption. He enjoyed feeling his bones half-melted in his body, the almost painful withdrawal of
the blood. Elena shared his new whim, and later they lay on the bed caressing each other and talking. Then Elena told Pierre the story she had heard in the morning from a young French woman who sewed for her.

  *

  ‘Madeleine used to work for a big department store. She came from the poorest ragpicker’s family in all Paris. Both her father and mother lived by picking garbage cans and selling the bits of tin, leather and paper they found. Madeleine was placed in the sumptuous bedroom furniture department, under the supervision of a suave, waxed, starched floorwalker. She had never slept on a bed, only on a pile of rags and newspapers in a shack. When people were not looking she felt the satin bedspreads, the mattresses, the feather pillows, as if they were ermine or chinchilla. She had a natural Parisian gift for appearing charmingly dressed on the money other women spent on stockings alone. She was attractive, with humorous eyes, curly black hair and well-rounded curves. She developed two passions, one to steal a few drops of perfume or cologne from the perfume department, another to wait until the store was closing so she could lie down on one of the softest beds and pretend she was to sleep there. She preferred the canopied ones. She felt more secure lying under the curtains. The floorwalker was usually in such a hurry to leave that she was left alone for a few minutes to indulge in this fantasy. She thought that while lying in such a bed her feminine charms were a million times enhanced, and she wished certain elegant men she had seen on the Champs Elysées could see her there and realize how well she would look in a beautiful bedroom.

  ‘Her fantasy became more complex. She arranged to have a mirrored dressing table placed in front of the bed so she could admire herself lying down. Then one day when she had accomplished every step of the ceremony, she saw that the floorwalker had been watching her with amazement. As she was about to leap off the bed he stopped her.