Lust

by Elfriede Jelinek

  The woman goes on. For a while a big strange dog joins her, hoping to be able to bite her foot, since she isn't wearing proper shoes. The Alpine Association has issued its warning: there's death in the mountains. The woman kicks the dog. She doesn't want anyone or anything expecting anything of her. The lights will soon be switched on in the houses, and every hearth will then be a place of truth and warmth, and the hammering and chiselling will be starting up inside the women.

  The valley is peopled with the wishes of part-time farmers. The children of God. Not of the personnel manager. The valley shoves up closer, like an excavator digging up the woman's footsteps. She walks by the immortal souls of the unemployed, whose number increaseth year by year as the Pope commanded. Youngsters flee their fathers and are chased by curses sharp as axes through the empty sheds and barns. The factory kisses the good earth from which it has taken the all too acquisitive people. We have to find ways of rationalizing our approach to the federal forests and federal funds. Paper is always needed. Now look: without a map, we would be headed straight for the abyss. Somewhat embarrassed, the woman thrusts her hands in the pockets of her dressing-gown. Her husband does take an interest in the unemployed, believe me: even if they are not kept busy, the thought of them keeps him busy, he never stops, never a moment's rest.

  In the mountain stream there are no chemicals learning to swim at this upper reach, just the occasional human faeces. The stream tosses restlessly in its bed beside the woman. The slopes are steeper now. Over there, round the bend, the sundered landscape is growing back together again. The wind is growing colder. The woman doubles over. Her husband has already kick-started her t wice today. Then at last his battery seemed to be flat. So off he drove to the factory, taking the hurdles on the way in massive voracious leaps, leaving them under his tyres. The ground crunches underfoot, a grinding sound, but It's not the grinding of teeth, they're hidden underneath. At this height there's little but rocks and mud off the scree. The woman has long since lost all feeling in her feet. This path can't be leading anywhere but a small sawmill at best, the grinding of teeth has ceased there too, it's silent most of the time, how can you say anything anyway without your teeth in. We are on our own. The occasional crofts and cottages by the wayside are equal, they have similarities. Old smoke rises from the rooftops. The occupants are drying out their floods of tears by the stove. Garbage is heaped by the outside toilets. Battered enamel buckets that have served for fifty weary years or more. Stacks of wood. Old crates. Rabbit hutches from which run rivers of blood. If Man can kill, so too can the wolf and the fox, his great role models. Slyly they slink by the chicken runs. Nighttime visitors. Domestic pets get rabies from them and pass it on to Man, their lordandmaster. Eat and be eaten. Take a good hard look. Like what you see?

  There she is, tiny when seen from our vantage point: the woman, at the end of the path, passing by, like time. Already the sun is very low. Clumsily it is sinking towards the crags. The child's heart is beating elsewhere.

  For sport. This Son of Man, this woman's child, is a coward, to tell the truth. Away onto the flat he steers his toboggan and he's out of earshot. Now, at the latest, the woman ought to turn back. Up ahead there is only some character on a cross, magnificently out-suffering all who have ever suffered since. Given this beautiful view it's hard to decide if we should have this moment last forever, and forgo the rest of the time that we're entitled to. Photographs often record this dilemma; but afterwards we're glad we're still alive and can look at the photos. It's not as if we could send in that remainder of time and receive a free gift in return. Still, we always want things to be beginning and never ending. Out into Nature go the people, hoping to return with an impression which their weary feet have made on the earth. Even the children want only to exist. As quickly as possible. On the slope with the ski lift. The moment they've tumbled out of the car. And we take a deep and innocent breath.

  This woman's child still can't see further than the end of his nose. His parents have to do that, they even have to clean the nose, and they offer prayers unto heaven that their offspring will beat everyone else's by a nose. Wetly, he sometimes offers his mother his mouth, his face half free of its halter, the horse collar of the violin already off. And as for his father. In the hotel bars of the county town he talks of his wife's body as he might talk of the founding of an association sponsored by his factory, though soon he'll be relegated to a lower division. The words that come from Father's lips have a pungent odour. You wouldn't find them in a book. To leave a living human being dog-eared and tattered like that and not even read her! Centuries will come and centuries will go and still this Man will bounce back. Jesus: you can't keep a good man down.

  This morning the woman was in a waking dream, a waiting dream, at the house, aimless, waiting for her husband, waiting on her husband, orange juice or grapefruit juice? So that he would catch her scent. Lick her off. Angrily, on the wing, he points at the jam. For it is written that she shall wait for him till evening when he cometh to bed down in her lap. Every day he uses his appliance as he has done for many a year. And what an impressive score he's run up. Men like scoring, one way or another. They're born with a target in their breast, their fathers send them over the hills and far away, just to shoot at other men's targets.

  The ice is thick on the ground. The grit lies scattered carelessly as if someone had emptied his pockets. The municipal authorities grit the roads so that vehicles don't break their tyres. The pavements for people aren't gritted. The idleness of the unemployed is a burden on the budget, but as they idle by they do not burden the mow. Their fate is in the hands of someone who already has his hands full with a wine glass and plateful from the simple buffet of cold cuts. The politicians have to wear their big and bursting hearts on their tongues. The woman gets a firm footing on the verge. Here, the law of the catalytic converter rules: unless money is thrown at it, the environment won't react to us ambitious wanderers. And even the wood would have to die. Open the window and let feeling in! Then Woman will show" that disease afflicts the Man's world.

  Flailing helplessly, Gerti stands on the ice. Offering herself. Her dressing-gown flapping about her. She claws at thin air. Crows caw. Her limbs fling forward as if she had sown a whirlwind and couldn't grasp the soughing and blowing on Mother's Day or the slurping of the Man at her trough when he appears below the table to lick the cream from her bowl. Woman is forever earthbound, they compare her with the earth, so she will open up and receive the Man's member. Perhaps lie down in the snow for a while? You wouldn't believe how many pairs of shoes this woman has at home! And who is it that's always egging her on to buy more clothes? For the Direktor, people count simply because they're people and can be used or else can be made into consumers who use things. That is how the unemployed of the area are addressed, who are in line to be eaten up by the factory when all they want is something to eat themselves. For the Direktor, they count doubly if they can sing for their supper. Or play the accordion or fool. Time passes, but we want it to say something to us. Not a moment of peace and quiet. The stereo drones eternal: listen, if patience and not the violin is what you play, what you have, oh sainted ones! The room is uplifted, a ray of light falls upon us, the beatitudes of sport and leisure cost the earth, and on the operating tables we re-enter the peaceable kingdom, resurrected, whole again.

  5

  THE SUPERMARKETS ARE bursting with captivating goods, people are their captives. On Saturday the Man is* supposed to be a partner, helping take in the catch in the nets. The fishermen sing. It is a simple tune and by now the Man has managed to learn it. Without saying a word he stands among the women who are counting their loose change and fighting starvation. How are two human beings supposed to become one if humankind cannot even join hands in a chain for peace? The woman is accompanied, the packages and bags are carried, no fuss, no noise. The Direktor is expensively showy in public, taking up the space that is other people's, checking to see what they're buying, though that is really a matte
r for his housekeeper. He is a god, scurrying to and fro among his creatures, who are less than children and collapse beneath temptations vaster than the ocean. He looks in other people's baskets and down cleavages, where undesirable colds are revealed and hot desires are concealed by neck-scarves. The houses tend to be cold and damp, so close to the stream. His wife's hand is rummaging among dead cellophane-wrapped creatures in the freezer, and when he looks at her, the paltriness of her meat, her fine clothes, he is beset by terrible impatience to let her partake of his own ample meat, his dong, his wonderful shlong. He wants to see it stir at the feeble touch of her fingers like a creature roused by the sun. He wants to see that little animal of his awake at the touch of her varnished talons and bed down again to sleep inside the woman. She'd better make an effort, in her silk blouse, so that he doesn't always have to do all the troublesome work himself, manhandling her breasts out and placing them on the plate of his hands. Why can't she serve herself up, be a little obliging, so he doesn't have to waste half an hour picking the fruit from the tree first. In vain. He pauses before the check-out to survey the gaping emptiness of his property, before which the goods are sitting up and begging, good boy. A number of supermarket employees are dancing attendance on him, who has taken their children away, some for his factory, others because they are having to move or become alcoholics. He is their lordandmaster and even lords it over time.

  The shopping bags have done what was required of them, they rustle and bustle through the hall, helped on their way by a kick from the Direktor. From time to time he tramples on the food in a temper, so that it squirts in the air. Then he tosses the woman in amongst the other goods to complete the picture, and she is allowed to breathe his air and lick his penis and anus. With a practised hand he catches her tits as they fall from her dress, they are already sagging and wilting but he gathers them into bunches like balloons with a firm grip. He seizes the woman by the nape and bends over her as if he meant to pick her up and stuff her in a sack. The furniture is glimpsed fleetingly as if it were on a flying visit. Clothes are scattered. You wouldn't say these two were exactly attached to each other, but in a moment they are well and truly attached to each other; funny, that. This particular patch has been used for grazing for years. The Direktor yanks out his product, which isn't paper, it's altogether harder, these are hard times after all. People like showing what they have hidden about them to each other as a sign that they have nothing to hide, that everything they say to their inexhaustibly flowing partners is true. They send out their members, the only messengers that always return to them. You can't say the same of money, for instance. Though it is loved more dearly than the hooves and horns of the loved one, already gnawed at by dogs. The products are produced, to the accompaniment of shrieking and thrashing, the tiny body factories grind and crunch, and the modest property, burdened down only by the happiness babbling forth from the lonely TV set, pours into a lonely pool of sleep where one can dream of bigger commodities and more expensive products. And humanity flourishes on the bank.

  The woman lies wide open, open wide, on the floor, slippy slithery eatables slopped upon her. Stock still. Only her husband is permitted to deal in her stocks and bonds. An honest broker. He falls from himself into the furnished emptiness of the room. Only his own body comes anywhere near doing justice to him. At sports, if required, he can hear himself sound and echo. The woman has to crook and angle her legs like a frog so that her husband, the examining magistrate, can look into the matter closely. A court of no appeal. She is flooded and shat full him, she has to get up and the last of her clothes fall on the floor and she fetches a sponge to clean the Man, that irreconcilable enemy of her sex, of himself and the slime that she has caused him to emit. He sticks his right forefinger up her arsehole and, tits dangling, she kneels above him and scrubs. Hair in her eyes and mouth. Perspiration on her brow. Another person's saliva at the base of her throat. The pale killer whale there before her till the friendly light dies, night comes, and the animal can begin to lash her with his tail again.

  They are usually silent as they return from the supermarket. Some of them, trying out their horsepower, hurry on by, and are unforgivingly preserved in memory. The milk churns by the wayside, the atoms breathing terribly in and out of them, stand waiting for collection. The farming co-operatives are at each other's throats, all of them competing; they cannot for very long bear the scrutiny of even the smallest holder, who cannot supply much milk and who cannot even be allowed to bleed dry. The woman is cloaked in the darkness of silence. But then she laughs, laughs till it seems she will never stop, to humiliate her husband. The pedantic patriarch. Such notions, keeping such a close eye on the girl at the check-out. Like so many of the wives of the unemployed, she mustn't make even the slightest mistake. The Direktor steals up beside her, she has to enter all the items again to make sure there isn't a single one too many. It's almost the same as in his factory. Except that the people here are smaller and wear women's clothing, from out of which they look about, finding that the family fits tightly and pinches. The Direktor has been known to pinch too. They fold in their wings, and from their bodies the children shoot forth, and the fathers zap their flashing lightning into the kiddies' newly-opened eyes. Disorganized flocks of women shoppers, intent on their shopping, shove past the ones who are enchanted by the goods, trying to make it to the grave as soon as they can. Their heads rise sheer as cliffs at the special offers. There are no freebies for this lot, quite the contrary, they are relieved of a part of their earnings from the paper mill. Horrified they stare at the boss, whom they hadn't expected to see here and of whom, to be plain, they were hardly thinking at all. Often we open our doors only to be confronted with people we hadn't been expecting at all, and then we're supposed to feed them. Salted sticks and potato snacks are all we can come up with to overshadow them.

  Gorges of shelving recede to the distant horizon. The bunch of people disperse. Already the last of their wishes, like the straps of sweaty vests, are slipping from their weary morning shoulders. Sisters, mothers, daughters. And the holy Direktorial couple, in perpetual repetition, are on their way back to the penal colony of sex, where they can whine for redemption to their heart's content. All that they receive in their cell, through the flaps and holes, is gruesome gruel, lukewarm, poured over their outstretched hands. Sex, like Nature, has its following. Who enjoy its products. And wear frilly lace for the purpose and the products of the cosmetics industry. Yes, and perhaps sex is the nature of humanity. I mean, it is in humanity's nature to chase after sex, until taken whole the one and the other are of equal importance. An analogy may convince you: you are what you eat. Till work pulps the human creature into a grubby heap. A melted snowman. Till, marked with the weals of his origins, he no longer even has a hole to retreat into. How long it takes, till humanity has finally been questioned and learns the truth about itself… While we're waiting, why not listen to me. These unworthy creatures are important and hospitable for just a single day, the day they marry. Only one year later they are made liable for the furniture and car. The whole family is liable for the crimes of one member if he can't keep up the payments. They even buy beds on the never-never, the beds they frolic in! Smile into the faces of strangers who lead them to their mangers. So that a stalk or so of hay wisps in the breath of sleep.

  Before they move on. But we, we have to get up at an ungodly hour every day. Alone and in a far-off place, we merely gaze down our narrow road, where the sweethearts we couple with are now the objects of other desires, to be used by others. They say a fire burns within women. But it's only dying embers. The shadow of afternoon falls on them in the morning when they creep from the gullet of attic bedrooms, where they have to look after a bawling child, into the maw of the mill. Go home, if you're tired! No one envies you. No one finds your beauty disarming any more. He hasn't for a long time. Rather, he strides out briskly, leaving you, and starts his car, where the dew lies fresh and glinting in the first bright highlights of sunshine. Quit
e unlike your matt and dull hair from which the glinting highlights have gone forever.

  The factory. My, how it deals with the unskilled folk who are pumped into it from inexhaustible sources. And how loud it is, inexhaustibly drowning the din of the stereos! A whole houseful of humanity. A factory built on the Direktor's lot. His plot. Who did it? they wonder, fetching a refreshing Coke from the dispenser. A tent of light and living creatures, where paper is manufactured. Rival firms are putting the competitive screws on, and if anyone ends up getting screwed it'll be the employees at the mill. The company that owns the factory in the adjoining federal province has far more clout and is right on a major traffic artery, the bleeders. Wood is pulped and the pulp is processed at the mill by people who've been pulped, at least that's what I've been told, and I'm glad that I, being free, can go into the silent woods in the heat of the day and spew my echo out. The armies of the irresponsible, people like me, who read their papers on the toilet, see to it that the trees disappear from the woods so that they can take the trees' places and unwrap their food from paper wrappings. Then at night people drink and worry. And when there's a dispute, the bloated and blinded multitude plunges into the depths of night.