Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  When I felt thirsty, I called a waiter; when I felt hungry, I went to the restaurant, where they served everything at every hour; when I ran out of funds, I went to the lifts; and, when I won, I played again until I lost everything.

  When I had exhausted all the joys the place had to offer, I signalled to the croupier that I thought was the best looking, drew him to the end of my row and made him a present of the whole of my last winnings. He took my face in his hands and kissed me on my mouth, a long, real cinema kiss. As I left him, I had the pleasure of ascertaining that his member was as proudly erect as the golden phalluses. I would gladly have given him a blow-job, but my jaws were beginning to ache. We gave each other a little wave and went our separate ways.

  I found the door back to the corridors and set off. Immediately the sinister ghosts came and breathed in my ears. To get away from the nuisance I opened the following door.

  *

  The Man at the Window

  “Will I find him again one day?’ I thought, as I opened a new door. Already I was unsure who this man was for whom I was searching. Wasn’t he one of those I had made love to here? By following in the steps of the man who had entered the little circus, who must be wandering like me through this strange kingdom and making love to other women, was I not pursuing an illusion? Or, on the contrary, were the men I had loved here no more than mere phantasms? Would I find true love only once I had completed this quest, so full of desires, joys and pains?

  How we would all like to be lucid all the time, to know what we are doing and why we are doing it! But, just as the more we gather knowledge the more we see the depth of our ignorance, so the more we progress in our understanding of ourselves and of the world the more the mystery, within us and around us, deepens. That is why, cast out in these dark corridors, we find ourselves at the mercy of fantasies which rule us more than we rule them, yet which are our allies, a sort of army which swells and accompanies us on our adventures.

  I had entered a small, simple room. I went to the window which was covered by light white curtains. It faced directly into the window of another building, separated from mine by a narrow alley. And in this room, which was similar to mine, a man sat in an armchair, reading.

  He was tall, well-built, mature, obviously handsome and athletic in his youth, but now grown a bit heavy with age. Was it the act of observing him through a window? Straight away I felt a strong curiosity about him.

  Strangely for a man reading quietly in his room he was wearing a dark, elegant suit, a white shirt and a narrow, sober tie which he had loosened around his open collar. His hair, cut short on his thick neck, was greying, and, even though he had an intellectual look about him, his heavy head could almost be that of a boxer, with his lumpy nose, his low brow, his prominent cheekbones and square chin. The bottom of his right trouser leg had ridden up as he sat cross-legged and I could see his sock, a fine, grey cotton sock snug over his ankle. I wasn’t able to make out the title of the book he was reading.

  The man didn’t move, yet the fact that I was spying on him without his knowledge excited me considerably. I felt that, by observing him, I was going to penetrate inside him, pierce his secrecy. It was like a rape without violence, something which filled me with a very soft, very sharp sensation.

  I looked at him and wondered what his life must be like; I imagined his naked body, his way of making love, his way of life... What was on his mind at this exact moment? What type of woman did he like? Was he sensuous, loving and sexual? Free? Capable of fantasy? Intelligent? Fun-loving? Shadowy? Mysterious?

  The man got up, went to his window and stopped, directly opposite me. I don’t know whether he could see me behind my curtains. We stood motionless for a while and soon I knew, from the expression on his face, that he was looking at me. I started slowly to undo the buttons down the front of my dress.

  Once I had opened my dress, I opened the curtains. He looked at my body, looked at me. I knelt down at the window and placed my mouth against the glass at the height of his penis on the other side of the alley. With my lips against the pane I started sucking, staring into his eyes, imploring him to respond to my desire. He undid his flies and took out his penis. He was erect.

  I closed my eyes for a moment in sheer happiness. He was magnificent. I devoured him with my gaze, again and again. Those balls and that thick cock sticking out of his elegant suit, beneath his tie, were magnificent. I got up, took off my dress and turned around slowly, wiggling my hips to allow him to examine my anatomy at his leisure.

  I pressed my breasts against the window and fondled them. He took his cock in his hand and slid it up and down. Then I pulled the chair up to the window, sat down with my legs spread over the armrests and started wanking right in front of him, without taking my eyes off him. I came as I watched him rub himself, faster and faster. At the moment when my hips convulsed and lifted from the chair, at the moment when I cried out, with my head back, I was aware that he was watching me eagerly and that I excited him as much as he excited me. I opened my eyes in time to see him ejaculate, shooting his lovely semen all over the window, where it began dripping down slowly.

  Then he left the room and didn’t reappear. I went to lie down and fell asleep immediately. I woke up at dusk. In bed, my first action was to look out the window. At that precise moment I saw the light go on and the man come into the room accompanied by a woman.

  She was a tall, strong woman wearing lots of make-up. “A whore,” I thought. She took off her coat, beneath which she was wearing a basque and stockings, her shoes had excessively long and pointed heels. Her large bosom swelled out like a pigeon’s breast.

  I left the light off in my room. They started making love and I told myself that he had deliberately brought her back to fuck her in a fully lit room before my eyes. She knelt down in front of him, as I had done in front of the window, and began sucking him off. Then he took her to the bed and began to grope and chew her large tits. How I wished I were in her place! How stiff he must be! I wanted him to have pleasure, even if I couldn’t give it to him myself. Yet, he soon lost interest. With the help of the girl he got undressed, lay on top of her and took her.

  The girl’s ankles, with their pointed heels, were wrapped around the neck of my loved-one, and his broad back moved up and down steadily between her thighs. I felt both very excited and very sad to see him making love with another woman. And I wasn’t sure whether it was the flame of jealousy or lust that was keeping me there behind this window in the dark, my chest tight, breathing in short gasps, making sure I caught every single detail of their copulation.

  The man made the girl go down on all fours in front of the window and, kneeling behind her, he buggered her, directly opposite me. I peered intensely at his face which was contorted with pleasure. I wanted to cry out “No, no!” and “Yes, yes!”, for I wanted to be her, I wanted to be him, I wanted him, I wanted this to be happening in my body... At the last minute he withdrew from the girl and ejaculated in the air, towards me. “That’s for me,” I thought, “it’s my present, he did it for me.” I came at the same time as him, my mouth open, as if I could swallow the come he was sending me.

  I left the room, feeling a little lost. I was never able to touch the man. He had given me nothing but the sight of him, and he would never give me anything else. Yet, if I had been able to meet him, he might have been the man I could have loved most in the world...

  I walked for a long time in the corridors, constantly seeing the same cruel and fascinating images. Was I right to expose myself like that in front of him? It was so ridiculous... but it would have been even worse if I hadn’t been able to express my desire. What had he thought of me? Had he loved me a little? Now that I had lost this man, this man I had never had, I had no appetite for anything else.

  The ghosts followed me, whispering behind my back and disappearing each time I turned round to try to see them. In the end they preoccupied me more than the memory of the man at the window. To escape from their tormenting ga
mes I decided to open another door.

  From ATOMISED

  Michel Houellebecq

  Michel Houellebecq is a French author, filmmaker, and poet. Having written poetry and a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, he published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. Atomised followed in 1998, and Platform in 2001. A publicity tour for Platform led to his being taken to court for inciting racial hatred, but a panel of three judges, delivering their verdict to a packed Paris courtroom, acquitted the author, ascribing Houellebecq’s opinions to the legitimate right of criticizing religions. He moved to Ireland to write for several years and currently resides in France.

  On Friday night Bruno barely slept. He had a bad dream. He was a piglet, his little body fat and glabrous. With the other little piglets, he was sucked by a vortex into a vast, dark tunnel, its walls rusted. He was carried by the slow drift of the current. At times, his feet touched the bottom, but then a powerful swell would carry him on. Sometimes he could make out the whitish flesh of his companions as they were brutally sucked down. He struggled through the darkness and a silence broken only by the scraping of their trotters on the metal walls. As they plunged deeper, he could hear the dull sound of machines in the distance. He began to realise that the vortex was pulling them towards turbines with huge, razor-sharp blades.

  Later, he saw his severed head lying in a meadow below the drainage pipe. His skull had been split from top to bottom, though what remained, lying on the grass, was still conscious. He knew that ants would slowly work their way into the exposed brain tissue to eat away at the neurons and finally he would slip into unconsciousness. As he waited, he looked at the horizon through his one remaining eye. The grass seemed to stretch out forever. Huge cogwheels turned under a metallic sky. Perhaps this was the end of time; at least the world that he had known had ceased to exist.

  Over breakfast he met the leader of the watercolour workshop – a veteran of ’68 who lived in Brittany. His name was Paul Le Dantec, one of the founding members of the Lieu; his brother was the current manager. He was the archetypal old hippie: long grey beard, Indian waistcoat and an ankh on a chain round his neck. At 55 this oldster lived a peaceful life. He would get up at dawn to go bird-watching in the hills, then sit down to a bowl of coffee and Calvados, and roll a cigarette amid the human traffic. The watercolour class didn’t start until ten o’clock; he had all the time in the world to chat.

  “As a veteran of the Lieu,” said Bruno, laughing to establish a sense of complicity, however false, “you must have a lot of stories about this place when it first opened – the Seventies, sexual liberation...”

  “Liberation my arse,” groaned the old hippie. “There were always women who could knit in the middle of an orgy and there were always blokes who just stood there waving their dicks. Take it from me, nothing much has changed.”

  “But I thought AIDS changed everything,” said Bruno.

  “I suppose it’s true that it used to be easier for men,” admitted the watercolourist. “You’d find a mouth or a pussy wide open and you could dive right in – no standing on ceremony. But for that, it had to be a proper orgy, invitation only, usually only couples. I tell you, I saw women with their legs wide open, wet and up for it, spending the whole evening masturbating because no one would fuck them. They couldn’t even find someone to get them off – you had to be able to get it up first.”

  “So, what you’re saying,” said Bruno thoughtfully, “is that there never was real sexual liberation – just another form of seduction.”

  “Oh, yeah...” agreed the hippie, “there’s always been a lot of seduction.”

  This didn’t exactly sound promising. Still, it was Saturday, so there would probably be a crop of new-comers. Bruno decided to chill out, take things as they came, go with the flow. He would try to get through the day without bother, and, ideally, without incident. At about eleven o’clock that evening he went down to the jacuzzi. A delicate haze rose above the gentle roar of the water, lit by the full moon. He approached soundlessly. A couple were entwined on the far side of the pool; it looked as if she had mounted him like a horse. “I have as much right as they have...” thought Bruno furiously. He undressed quickly and slipped into the jacuzzi. The night air was cool, the water, by contrast, was deliciously warm. Between the twisted branches of the pine trees he could see the stars, he could feel himself relax a little. The couple paid no attention to him; the girl continued to pump up and down on the guy, she started to whimper. It was impossible to see her face. The man began to breathe heavily too. The woman’s rhythm began to pick up tempo; she threw her head back and, for a moment, the moon lit up her breasts, her face still hidden behind a dark mass of hair. Then she crushed herself against her partner and wrapped herself around him; his breathing was heavier now, then he let out a long moan and was silent.

  They stayed there for a minute, wrapped around one another, then the man stood up and got out of the pool. He unrolled the condom on his penis before dressing. Bruno was surprised to see that the woman was not leaving with him. The man’s footsteps died away and there was silence once more. She stretched out her legs in the water. Bruno did likewise. He felt her foot on his thigh, brushing against his penis. With a soft splash she pushed herself from the edge and came to him. Clouds shadowed the moon; the woman was barely a foot away but still he could not make out her face. He felt an arm against his thigh and another wrap around his shoulder. Bruno pressed his body to hers, his face against her small, firm breasts. He let go of the edge and gave himself up to the moment. He could feel her drawing him towards the centre of the pool, then slowly she began to turn. He felt the muscles in his neck give, his head felt suddenly heavy. Below the surface, the gentle murmur of the water became a thunderous roar. He saw the stars as they wheeled slowly overhead. He relaxed into her arms, his erect penis broke the surface of the water. She moved her hands gently, barely a caress. He was completely weight-less. Her long hair brushed his stomach and then her tongue touched the tip of his glans. His whole body shuddered with pleasure. She closed her lips and slowly, so slowly, took him in her mouth. He closed his eyes, his body shuddering in ecstasy. The thunderous underwater roar was regular and reassuring. When he felt her lips at the base of his penis, he could feel the movement of her throat. He felt himself flooded with intense waves of pleasure and buoyed up by the thunderous whirlpool. All at once he felt very hot. She gently allowed her throat to contract around him; all the energy in his being rushed suddenly to his penis. He howled as he came; he had never felt such fulfilment in his life.

  THE DEVIL’S WHISPER

  Henri Breton

  Henri Breton, a painter and writer of Anglo-French parentage, has written several short stories and articles for the Erotic Review. In his youth, for reasons never fully explained, he took passage on a tramp steamer from Liverpool to Valparaiso, where he remained for some years, earning a living from journalism until his return to Europe. His main love is the Mediterranean and the countries that surround it. He currently divides his time between London and Barcelona.

  The Sea Captain had spotted a slim, dapper man the other side of the café and beckoned him with a wave. He waved back and came over to us, a slightly built individual, with a dark complexion and black, brilliantined hair. He gave the appearance of a nervous mouse scurrying for cover, moving in little darting rushes, and he apologised for disrupting our table. We cheerfully disabused him of this, found another chair and made room for him. And in no time at all the company had assimilated him, placed a glass before him and made sure it was full.

  “How are things with you, Claude?”

  “Well, not much to tell you, really,” he replied with an apologetic smile, and as he said this his head inclined to the left and he shot his hands out sideways, palms up, like a maître d’hôtel announcing that all he could offer for dinner was an omelette.

  We drank some more, smoked, and gradually, inevitably, the conversation came around to women. The company was exclu
sively male that evening, and the language we used, though full of respect for so important a subject, was both extravagant and without restraint. Later the area under discussion was further narrowed down to “disappointments in love”. I thought that the Sea Captain would have something to add here, for he had often hinted at romantic failures in the past, but he was unusually silent and if he had anything in the way of comment or reminiscence, it was going to have to wait for another day.

  “It’s hardly something to boast about, but I think I can cap all of your stories tonight,” ventured Claude in a quiet, clear voice. “Disappointments are always sad, but missed opportunities are sometimes tragic.”

  “About two years back, I met this girl from Gothenburg – Birgit. She worked for a small shipping business here in the city: she was lovely, really, a pretty face with everything large except her little retroussé nose: full lips, generous mouth, and huge eyes – eyes like the grey Atlantic Ocean. All framed by blonde hair that fell to her shoulders. She was taller than me – but that was all right, I couldn’t get enough of her. Even if she’d been twice my size.

  “She had been married briefly and unhappily. Her husband was a drunken lout who beat her and, very sensibly, she left him, taking the first job her firm could offer her far from Gothenburg, far from Sweden. Despite her unhappy marital life, she was a domesticated soul: God, she loved to cook, or what passes for cooking in Sweden – they have very different ideas, you know – and every evening I would turn up at her place to eat. And every night it was the same thing: a sort of smörgåsbord – or as near as she could get to it – accompanied by ice-cold akavit or beer and followed by some energetic but sadly, quite unremarkable, fucking. I would usually leave before midnight, for we both found it more convenient that I should. She had a sweet, generous nature and I grew very fond of this tall, lusty Swedish blonde and her regime; she was quite the archetype of Scandinavian womanhood – or so I thought – and it seemed to me that I could do worse than settle down with someone who had so much going for her.