Delta of Venus

by Anais Nin

  Bijou began teasing again. She touched Viviane’s mouth with the tip of the penis, her ears, her neck, she rested it between her breasts. Viviane pressed her breasts together to hold it. She moved to join Bijou’s body, to rub herself against her, but Bijou was evasive now that Viviane was becoming a little wild. The man, bending over them, began to grow restless. He wanted to fall on the women. His companion would not let him, though her face was flushed.

  The Basque suddenly opened the door. He bowed and said, ‘You wanted a man and here I am.’ He threw off his clothes. Viviane looked at him gratefully. The Basque realized she was in heat. Two virilities would satisfy her more than that teasing, elusive one. He threw himself between the women. Everywhere the foreign man and woman looked something was happening that enthralled them. A hand was opening someone’s buttocks and slipping in an inquisitive finger. A mouth was closing upon a leaping, charging penis. Another mouth was enclosing a nipple. Faces were covered by breasts or buried in pubic hair. Legs were closing over a burrowing hand. A glistening wet penis would appear and plunge again into flesh. The ivory skin and the gypsy skin were tangled with the man’s muscular body.

  Then a strange thing happened. Bijou lay full length under the Basque. Viviane was abandoned for a moment. The Basque was crouching over this woman who bloomed under him like some hothouse flower, odorous, moist, with erotic eyes and wet lips, a full-blown woman, ripe and voluptuous; yet her rubber penis stood erect between them, and the Basque was overtaken with an odd feeling. The penis touched his own and defended the opening of the woman like a lance. He commanded almost angrily, ‘Take it off.’ She slid her hands under her back, unfastened the belt and pulled the rubber penis off. Then he threw himself on her, and she, still holding the penis, held it over the buttocks of the man who was now buried inside of her. When he raised himself to thump into her again, she pushed the rubber penis inside of his buttocks. He leaped like a wild animal and attacked her only more furiously. Each time he raised himself, he found himself attacked from behind. He felt the breasts of the woman crushed beneath him, rolling under his chest, her ivory-skinned belly heaving under his, her hips against his, her moist vagina engulfing him; and each time she plunged the penis into him, he felt not only his turmoil but hers as well. He thought the doubled sensation would drive him mad. Viviane lay there watching them, panting. The foreign man and woman, still clothed, had fallen over her and were rubbing against her frantically, too confused in wild sensations to seek an opening.

  The Basque was sliding back and forth. The bed rocked as they rolled, clutching and folding, all curves filled, the machine of Bijou’s voluptuous body yielding honey. Ripples extended from the roots of their hair to the tips of their toes. Their toes sought each other and intertwined. Their tongues projected like pistils. Bijou’s cries now mounted in endless spirals, ah, ah, ah, ah, widening, expanding, becoming more savage. The Basque answered every cry with only a deeper plunge. They were oblivious to the twisted bodies near them; he must now possess her to annihilation – Bijou, this whore, with a thousand tentacles on his body, lying first under him and then over him and seeming to be everywhere inside of him, her fingers everywhere, her breasts in his mouth.

  She cried as if he had murdered her. She lay back. The Basque stood up, drunk, burning. His lance still erect, red, inflamed. The disordered clothes of the foreign woman lured him. He could not see her face, which was hidden under her raised skirts. The man was lying over Viviane, belaboring her. The woman was lying over both of them, her legs kicking in the air. The Basque pulled her down by the legs to take her. But she screamed and stood up. She said, ‘I only wanted to look.’ She arranged her clothes. The man abandoned Viviane. Disheveled as they were, they bowed ceremoniously and hurriedly left.

  Bijou was sitting up, laughing, her tilted eyes long and narrow. The Basque said, ‘We gave them a good spectacle. Now you get dressed and follow me. I’m going to take you home. I’m going to paint you. I’ll pay Maman whatever she wants.’

  And he took her home to live with him.

  If Bijou thought that the Basque had taken her home to have her all to himself, she was soon to be disillusioned. The Basque used her as a model almost continuously, but in the evenings he always had his artist friends for dinner, and Bijou was then the cook. After dinner he would make her lie on the bed in the studio while he talked with his friends. He merely kept her at his side and fondled her. His friends could not help watching them. His hand would mechanically circle over her ripe breasts. Bijou would not move. She would fall into a languid pose. The Basque would touch the material of her dress as if it were her skin. Her dresses always molded her body tightly. His hand would appraise and pat and caress, then circle over her belly, then suddenly tickle her to make her squirm. He would open her dress, take out one breast and say to his friends, ‘Did you ever see such a breast? Look!’ They looked. One was smoking, one was sketching Bijou, the other talking; but they looked. Against the black dress the breast, so perfect in its contours, had the color of old ivory marble. The Basque pinched the nipples, which reddened.

  Then he would close the dress again. He would feel along the legs until he touched the prominence of the garters. ‘Isn’t it too tight for you? Let’s see. Has it left a mark?’ He would lift the skirt and carefully remove the garter. As Bijou lifted her leg to him the men could see the smooth gleaming lines of her thighs above the stocking. Then she covered herself again and the Basque would continue to fondle her. Bijou’s eyes would blur as if she were drunk. But because she was now like the Basque’s wife and in the company of the Basque’s friends, each time he exposed her she fought to cover herself again, hiding away each new secret in the black folds of her dress.

  She stretched her legs. She kicked off her shoes. The erotic light that shone from her eyes, a light that her heavy eyelashes could not shade sufficiently, traversed the bodies of the men like fire.

  On nights like this she knew the Basque was not intent on giving her pleasure but on torturing her. He would not be satisfied until the faces of his friends were altered, decomposed. He would pull the zipper on the side of her dress and slip in his hand. ‘You are not wearing panties today, Bijou.’ They could see his hand under the dress, caressing the belly and descending toward the legs. Then he would stop and withdraw his hand. They watched his hand coming out of the black dress and closing the zipper again.

  Once he asked one of the painters for his warm pipe. The man handed it to him. He slipped the pipe up Bijou’s skirt and laid it against her sex. ‘It’s warm,’ he said. ‘Warm and smooth.’ Bijou moved away from the pipe because she did not want them to know that all the Basque’s fondlings had wetted her. But the pipe came out revealing this, as if it had been dipped in peach juice. The Basque handed it back to its owner, who was thus given a little of Bijou’s sexual odor. Bijou was afraid of what the Basque would invent next. She tightened her legs. The Basque was smoking. The three friends sat around the bed, talking disconnectedly as if the gestures which were taking place had nothing to do with their conversation.

  One of them was talking about the woman painter who was filling the galleries with giant flowers in rainbow colors. ‘They’re not flowers,’ said the pipe smoker, ‘they’re vulvas. Anyone can see that. It is an obsession with her. She paints a vulva the size of a full-grown woman. At first it looks like petals, the heart of a flower, then one sees the two uneven lips, the fine center line, the wavelike edge of the lips when they are spread open. What kind of a woman can she be, always exhibiting this giant vulva, suggestively vanishing into a tunnel-like repetition, growing from a large one to a smaller, the shadow of it, as if one were actually entering into it. It makes you feel as though you were standing before those sea plants which open only to suck in whatever food they can catch, open with the same wavering edges.’

  At this moment the Basque had an idea. He asked Bijou to bring the shaving brush and razor. Bijou obeyed. She was glad for a chance to move about and shake off the erotic let
hargy his hands had woven around her. His mind was on something else now. He took the brush and soap from her and began to mix a lather. He placed a new blade in the razor. Then he said to her, ‘Lie on the bed.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she said. ‘I have no hairs on my legs.’

  ‘I know you haven’t. Show them.’ She extended them. They were indeed so smooth that they looked as if they had been polished. They shone like some pale precious wood, highly burnished, not a hair showing, no veins, no roughness, no scars, no defects. The three men bent over her legs. As she shook them, the Basque caught them against his trousers. Then he raised her skirt while she fought to bring it down.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked again.

  He raised her skirt and exposed such a luxuriant tuft of curled hair that the three men whistled. She kept her legs tightly closed, her feet against the Basque’s trousers, where he suddenly felt a swarming sensation, like a hundred ants traveling over his sex.

  He asked the three men to hold her. Bijou squirmed at first and then realized it was less dangerous to lie still, for he was carefully shaving her pubic hair, beginning at the edges, where it lay sparse and shining on her velvety belly. The belly came down in a soft curve there. The Basque lathered, then shaved gently, wiping off the hair and soap with a towel. With her legs tightly closed the men could not see anything but the hair, but as the Basque shaved on and reached the center of the triangle, he exposed a mount, a smooth promontory. The feeling of the cold blade there agitated Bijou. She was half-angry, half-stirred, intent on not showing her sex, but the shaving revealed where the smoothness descended into a fine incurving line. It revealed the bud of the opening, the soft folded flesh that enclosed the clitoris, the tip of the more intensely colored lips. She wanted now to move away but she was afraid of being hurt by the blade. The three men held her and bent over her to watch. They thought the Basque would stop there. But he ordered her to part her legs. She shook her feet against him, which only excited him more. He said again, ‘Part your legs. There are some more hairs down there.’ She was forced to open them, and he gently began to shave off the hairs, sparse again, delicately curled, on each side of the vulva.

  And now everything was exposed – the long vertically placed mouth, a second mouth, which opened not like the mouth of the face, but which opened only if she chose to push out a little. But Bijou would not push, and they could see just the two lips, closed, barring the way.

  The Basque said, ‘Now she looks like the paintings by that woman, doesn’t she?’

  But in the paintings, the vulva was open, the lips parted, showing the paler inner layer like the inside of the lips of the mouth. This, Bijou would not show. Once shaved, she had closed her legs again.

  The Basque said, ‘I will make you open there.’

  He had rinsed the soap off the brush. Now he brushed the vulva lips, up and down, gently. At first, Bijou contracted herself even more. The men’s heads leaned closer. The Basque, holding her legs against his erection, meticulously brushed the vulva and the tip of the clitoris. Then the men saw that Bijou could no longer contract her buttocks and sex, that as the brush moved, her buttocks rolled a little forward, the lips of the vulva parted, at first imperceptibly. The nakedness exposed every nuance of her motion. Now the lips parted and exposed a second aura, of a paler shade, then a third, and now Bijou was pushing, pushing as if she would open. Her belly moved in accord, swelling and falling. The Basque leaned more firmly against her writhing legs.

  ‘Stop,’ begged Bijou, ‘stop.’ The men could see the moisture oozing from her. Then the Basque stopped, not wanting to give her pleasure, reserving that for himself later.

  Bijou was eager to make a distinction between her life in the whorehouse and her life as the companion and model of an artist. The Basque was intent on making only one little distinction, merely in the matter of actual possession. But he liked to expose her and delight his visitors with the sight of her. He made them assist at her bath. They liked to watch how her breasts floated in the water, how the swelling of her belly could make the water heave, how she raised herself to pass soap between her legs. They liked to dry her wet body. But if any of them tried to see Bijou privately, and possess her, then the Basque became a demon and a man to fear.

  In revenge for these games, Bijou felt she had a right to go where she wanted. The Basque maintained her in a highly eroticized condition and did not always trouble to satisfy her. Her infidelities started then, but they were done so elusively that the Basque could never catch her. Bijou collected her lovers at the Grande Chaumière, where she posed for the drawing class. On winter days she did not undress quickly and surreptitiously as the other models did, next to the stove near the model’s stand, in view of everybody. Bijou had an art for this.

  First she loosened her wild hair, shook it like a mane. Then she unbuttoned her coat. Her hands were slow and caressing. She did not handle herself objectively, but like a woman ascertaining with her hands the exact condition of her body, patting it in gratitude for its perfections. Her perennial black dress clung to her body like a second skin and was filled with mysterious openings. One gesture opened the shoulders and let the dress fall over her breasts but no further. At this point she decided to look at her face mirror and examine her eyelashes. Then she opened the zipper which exposed the ribs, the beginning of the breasts, the beginning of the belly’s curve. All the students were watching her from behind their easels. Even the women rested their eyes on the luxuriant parts of Bijou’s body, which burst from the dress dazzlingly. The flawless skin, the soft contours, the firm flesh fascinated them all. Bijou had a way of shaking herself, as if to loosen her muscles, as the cat does before he leaps. This shake, which ran through her body, gave the breasts an air of being handled with violence. Then she took the dress lightly at the hem and lifted it slowly over her shoulders. When it reached her shoulders, she was always stuck for a moment. Something caught with her long hair. No one helped her. They were all petrified. The body which emerged, hairless, now absolutely naked, as she stood with her legs apart to keep her balance, startled them by the sensuality in every curve, by its richness and femininity. The wide black garters were placed high. She wore black stockings, and, if it was a rainy day, high leather boots, men’s boots. As she struggled with the boots, she was at the mercy of anyone who approached her. The students were sorely tempted. One might pretend to help her, but as he approached her she would kick him, sensing his real intention. She continued to struggle with the entangled dress, shaking herself as if in a spasm of love. Finally, she freed herself, after the students had satisfied their eyes. She freed her rich breasts and tangled hair. Sometimes she was asked to keep her boots on, the heavy boots from which expanded, like a flower, the ivory-colored female body. Then a wind of desire would sweep the entire class.

  Once on the stand she became a model, and the students remembered they were artists. If she saw one that she liked, she rested her eyes on him. This was the only time she had to make engagements, for the Basque would be coming to fetch her at the end of the afternoon. The student knew what her look meant: She would accept a drink with him in the café nearby. The initiated knew, too, that this café had two floors. The upper one was occupied by card players in the evening, but was absolutely deserted in the afternoon. Only lovers knew this. The student and Bijou would go there, climb the flight of stairs with the sign marked lavabos, and find themselves in a semi-dark room of mirrors and tables and chairs.

  Bijou ordered the waiter to bring them a drink, then she lay back on the leather banquette and relaxed. The young student she had selected was trembling. Emanating from her body was a heat he had never felt before. He fell on her mouth, his fresh skin and beautiful teeth luring her to open fully to his kiss and respond with her tongue. They tussled on the long narrow bench, and he began to feel as much of her body as he could, fearing that at any time she would say, ‘Stop, someone might come up the stairs.’

  The mirrors refl
ected their tussling, the disorder of her dress and her hair. The student’s hands were supple and audacious. He slipped under the table and raised her skirt. Then she did say, ‘Stop, someone might come upstairs.’ He replied, ‘Let them. They won’t see me.’ It is true they could not see him there under the table. She sat forward, resting her face on her cupped hands, as if she were dreaming, and let the young student kneel and bury his head under her skirt.

  She became languid and abandoned herself to his kisses and caresses. Where she had felt the Basque’s shaving brush, she now felt the young man’s tongue. She fell forward, overwhelmed with pleasure. Then they heard steps, and the student quickly raised himself and sat next to her. To cover his confusion he kissed her. The waiter found them embracing and left hurriedly after accomplishing his errand. Now Bijou’s hands were burrowing into the young student’s clothes. He was kissing her so furiously that she fell on her side on the bench and he over her. He whispered, ‘Come to my room. Please come to my room. It isn’t far.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Bijou. ‘The Basque is coming for me soon.’ Then each took the other’s hand and placed it where it could give the greatest pleasure. Sitting there in front of the drinks as if they were conversing together, they caressed each other. The mirrors revealed them as if they were about to sob, their features constricted, their lips trembling, their eyes batting. From their faces one could follow the movement of their hands. At times the young student looked as if he were being wounded and were gasping for air. Another couple came upstairs while their hands were still at work, and they had to kiss again, like romantic lovers.

  The young student, unable to conceal the condition he was in, went off somewhere to calm himself. Bijou returned to the class, her body on fire. When the Basque came for her at closing hour, she was calm again.