Helen And Desire

by Alexander Trocchi

  I walked quickly away in the direction of the bar.

  In my haste, I walked at full tilt into a young man in a white dinner jacket. He apologised profusely and I found him leading me into the bar.

  Over our drinks he introduced himself as Youssef . . .1. He was some kind of sheikh. His yacht, he said, was in the bay. At any other time I would have been fascinated by the dark good looks of this young Arab, but at that moment, I could think of little else but of Devlin’s madness. Ten minutes later, out of the corner of my eyes, I saw my lover pass across the floor of the next room and return a moment later with hands and pockets stuffed with large chips. He had obviously been to cash another cheque.

  ‘The young American,’ Youssef said, ‘you are his friend?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It is a great pity,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I have watched him now for over a week. He has lost a small fortune.’

  ‘Do you play yourself?’

  ‘Sometimes, when I feel I’m on a lucky streak. I actually win. But it takes a certain amount of discipline.’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Have another drink,’ he said kindly. ‘It will make you feel better. He is not your husband?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m glad of that, for there is little you can do.’

  ‘About his gambling?’

  He nodded.

  About midnight, Devlin lurched into the bar. He was as pale as a ghost. He glanced for a moment at us and then strode over to the bar. He drank a number of brandies one after the other. I made to get up and go over to him but Youssef restrained me.

  ‘It’s better not,’ he said. ‘He’ll come when he’s ready.’

  Five minutes later Devlin came.

  He looked at the Arab with something approaching a look of hate.

  ‘Are you with him or with me?’ he snapped.

  Youssef stood up apologetically. ‘Please sit down, sir. I was merely keeping the lady company until you returned.’

  ‘Blow, wog!’ Devlin said coarsely.

  ‘Harry!’

  ‘And you shut your damn little mouth!’

  Youssef was staring dangerously at Devlin’s drunken face.

  ‘I thought I told you to blow?’

  ‘I will leave in my own good time,’ the Arab said with an effort. ‘To lose is stupid, but to lose badly is disgusting.’

  ‘Oh, you think so, do you?’ Devlin leered. ‘Well, I’ll let you into a little secret. Your opinion doesn’t concern me, wog! Savvy? Speakada Inglees?’

  The sheikh controlled himself. ‘If you hadn’t already lost your fortune as well as your manners,’ he began . . .

  Devlin laughed hoarsely. ‘What do you know about it? You want to play for high stakes, you perfumed camel man?’

  ‘Don’t play with him, Youssef!’ I cried.

  ‘Don’t play with him!’ mimicked Devlin, and then he turned to me. ‘You keep out of this, you bitch! Just . . . keep . . . your . . . trap . . . shut!’

  ‘I believe we are staying at the same hotel,’ Youssef said calmly. ‘My suite is on the first floor.’ He turned to me, ‘Goodnight, mademoiselle.’

  ‘If you go to his rooms, I shall leave you,’ I said after the sheikh had gone.

  ‘What was the proverb about the rats?’ Devlin asked into the air as he made his way over to the bar for another drink.

  3 a.m. I sat up late in our room, waiting for Devlin to return. For the first time in my life I was certain, absolutely certain, of my own motives. I wanted to leave him because I disliked him. I found it difficult to forgive his coarse insults. At the same time, his remark about the rats affected me deeply. It was true that he had lost a great deal of money, more than he could afford, and now I was quite certain that he was on the first floor in Youssef’s suite. If I was any judge of character, it would be Devlin who would lose. It was this reluctance to desert him when he was down that caused me to await his return. I had smoked almost a packet of cigarettes since returning to the room.

  When he came in, he was paler than before but apparently sober. He flopped down on an armchair without a word and stared at the carpet. I fixed him a drink and carried it across to him. He took it quietly. A moment later he said:

  ‘I’m finished, Helen.’

  His voice sounded so small and pathetic that I ran over to his side and sat on the floor beside his chair. He ran his fingers through my hair.

  ‘I’ve written cheques for over $100,000 at the Casino,’ he said slowly. ‘And as for that damn Arab, he has my notes for more than $120,000. God knows whether I’ve got that amount of money in the world!’

  ‘Oh, Harry! Look, darling. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll speak to Youssef. I’ll get him to give you your notes back.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing! I’d rather die.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Harry!’

  ‘Good God, do you think I could let you do that after the way I insulted him?’

  ‘You could apologise.’

  ‘To him!’

  ‘I think you’re being foolish, Harry.’

  ‘You want me to go creeping on my knees to him?’

  ‘If necessary, yes!’

  ‘You’ll wait a long time and more for that!’

  ‘I don’t think it would be necessary. I’m sure he would give the notes to me.’

  ‘I’ll see him in hell first!’

  I shrugged hopelessly, walked across to the mantelpiece, and lit a cigarette.

  ‘What do you intend to do?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Helen,’ he said eagerly.

  ‘It’s about time,’ I answered drily.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Helen! What’s done’s done. As for the future, that all depends on you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I shall have to go back to the States and get a job.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I want you to come with me,’ he said eagerly.

  ‘We’ll be poor for a while but we’ll make out somehow. If only you’ll come with me . . .’

  ‘That’s out of the question.’ I tried to say it as gently as possible but he looked as though I had struck him on the face.

  ‘What do you mean “out of the question”?’

  ‘Just that, Harry. I won’t go with you.’

  ‘Am I so repulsive all of a sudden?’ he sneered.

  ‘You’re not repulsive at all, at least not now you aren’t. The point is that I’m not in love with you and, anyway, I wouldn’t make a good poor man’s wife.’

  ‘So you’re going to walk out on me?’

  ‘That’s hardly a fair way to put it. I’ll do as much as I can. I’ll stay with you for a few weeks if it will help. I could let you have a few thousand dollars.’

  ‘Conscience money!’

  ‘You’ve no right to talk that way, Harry! You brought it all on yourself.’ I had been about to say, ‘You’ve had your fling,’ but I didn’t have the heart to.

  ‘Are you walking out on me or aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve already answered that question.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said bitterly. He was looking pale and drawn. He got up and walked through into the other bedroom. I sat down unsteadily on the arm of the chair he had vacated. I wasn’t feeling altogether hopeless about Devlin’s situation because I felt sure that Youssef would return the notes to me. As far as the Casino losses were concerned, there was nothing we could do. Devlin wasn’t a Russian Admiral and he had no fleet anchored in the bay. And anyway, perhaps only a Russian could have acted in such a swashbuckling manner.

  I stood up. There was no point in wasting time. I would go at once to see Youssef. Devlin would undoubtedly feel better when he had cut his losses by more than half. But as I walked towards the door a loud explosion took place in the next room. I froze momentarily and then, with a wild cry, threw myself towards the bedroom.

  Horrified, I was standing staring at the corpse which a few minutes ago had been a live and passionate man. I
was shivering with terror, rooted to the spot, when I felt a hand take me at the elbow. It was Youssef.

  ‘The young fool!’ he said, looking down at the lifeless body. ‘I was just on my way to give him the notes back.’

  ‘It will not be necessary for you to go ashore again,’ Youssef said as he approached me along the deck.

  Shortly after the suicide, he had spirited me on board his yacht, and I was standing on the quarterdeck looking at the ghostly early morning outline of the prince’s castle at Monaco.

  ‘The police are quite satisfied that it is a clear case of suicide. I asked for you to be excused to avoid publicity. They were quite understanding about it.’

  I thanked him.

  ‘Why did he do it?’ Youssef said suddenly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He laughed nervously. ‘I mean, did he say anything to you? Give you any indication?’

  ‘None whatsoever. I told him I wouldn’t marry him and he got angry and said I was running out on him.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘It was hardly like that. I offered to stay with him for a while.’

  ‘But he must obviously have blamed you for his suicide, I mean he did it to impress you.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can say that! I wouldn’t marry him and go and live in America with him. But surely that was no reason for him to go and shoot himself.’

  ‘I think it probably was his reason.’

  ‘And what about you! It was you who ruined him!’

  ‘We were both to blame, perhaps,’ Youssef said gently.

  ‘Or neither of us. He was mad. I told him you would give him his notes back. I was just coming to you when I heard the shot.’

  ‘A postmortem won’t help anyway,’ Youssef said. ‘Look, Helen, we’re both of us upset about this. Why don’t we get out of here, now, this minute. A couple of weeks holiday would do you the world of good.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘North Africa,’ he said. ‘We can make for Algiers.’

  ‘For two weeks?’

  ‘As long as you care to come for,’ he said, looking into my eyes.

  ‘Yes, I think I’d like that,’ I said finally.

  Half an hour later the sleek white yacht slipped quietly out of the harbour into the Mediterranean.

  Chapter Eleven

  I have not added anything to my account for over a week. I have seldom been able to isolate the desire. It has existed as the consciousness of something left undone in the kaleidoscopic matrix of my feelings, like a patch, an imperfection on a quilt, which, with the passage of time, comes to blend with the material of the quilt until in the end, except to close scrutiny, it is imperceptible.

  God knows my original desire was strong enough. I felt I must put into words the teeming mass of experience I have lived through. At the beginning, there was a distinct desire for revenge against Youssef, who, to resolve the guilt on his own conscience, thrust my present life upon me. Intellectually, that desire still exists, but it is a mere shadow, bloodless, like a textbook recommendation. And gradually the whole desire to commit my experiences to history has been outflanked by the terrible pleasure I experience in approaching the unconscious state of an object, an amorphous mass of sensitive flesh and fibre without the form of will. It is indeed doubtful whether I can still usefully use the word ‘I.’ Certainly the governing vision that in the past I used to identify with myself has grown so dim during most of my ‘waking’ hours as not to be a personality at all. I have lusted as it were to melt out of myself, to become the anonymous and vibrant plasm which the regular application of drugs – hashish I believe – has made me. I am indescribably lazy. Breathing itself is such a pleasant effort! The vague and exciting apprehension of the nights when my unknown lovers will visit me, ramming their hard and lustful bodies against the soft willingness which is my shuddering flesh, that apprehension is for the most part the only ‘thought’ which occupies my consciousness. And even that – I have only to close my eyes and sigh to experience an ecstatic tumescence at the core of my belly and to send minute ripples of tingling pleasures across the broad plains of my peerless skin.

  I am Narcissus. I look into the water and find myself beautiful, indeed, the only beauty. The comings and goings of my ‘lovers’ are merely the gentle showers which nurture the plant. And the plant is myself, living on and on with a slow stirring motion through nights and days and nights and days of voluptuousness.

  What an effort it is to write this! I yawn. I clap my hand to that vast bud of sex which is strapped like a sweetly odoriferous gully between my mountainous thighs. I experience an earthquake. I laugh a deep laugh of mammal content, a laugh which I do not recognise as the superficial titter which in the past was evoked by an amusing situation. No. This is the laugh of flesh which has inherited the earth. Oh God, what an ecstasy!

  Food? Its taste is very pleasant, but it is rather an effort to eat it. All I eat willingly and without reservation is the exotic mouth-ringing mixture of honey and almonds and . . .

  I seem to be getting farther and farther away from the conclusion of my story. I think: ‘I must begin now. An hour or two is all that is necessary. Now. Get the paper. See, it is still light outside. See, there is the marketplace over there. In the distance. How bright the colours are in their haze! A heat haze I suppose. And the buildings startlingly white . . .’

  But what was I trying to say? The warmth comes up to me from the street. Where am I? I am sitting again on the bed. I am clenching my teeth. I am trying to concentrate. Yes. I am on a yacht . . .

  . . . arriving at Algiers.

  ‘You’ll love the desert, Helen!’ Youssef whispered. His dark handsome face appeared behind me in the mirror, tilted forwards as his lips sought my bare neck.

  I had been dressing. I was standing in my panties and my brassiere in front of the long mirror, fastening my long sheer nylon stockings to my garter belt in preparation for going ashore.

  ‘You’re keeping me back,’ I laughed. ‘Why don’t you be a good boy and look out of the porthole?’

  ‘When I can look at you?’ His soft lips moved deliriously at the soft skin of my shoulder.

  ‘Is that what you call “looking”?’

  ‘Looking, feeling, kissing, loving,’ he said, holding me backwards against him so that the firm rounds of my buttocks were warm and close at his groin. ‘What a beautiful body you’ve got, Helen!’

  ‘Thank you, sir. But if you want me to see this beautiful desert of yours you’d better allow me to dress.’

  ‘I don’t want you to dress,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to be naked, always. Naked and hot.’

  ‘I’m always hot. Sometimes it’s not possible to be naked.’

  He laughed and bit me playfully on the shoulder.

  ‘You’re a hot bitch!’

  ‘Hot I certainly am, and bitch I may be, but I don’t see the necessity for the conjunction. And now, dear sheikh, please step backwards while I put my skirt on.’

  He sat in a chair, watching me dress, and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Will I see a mirage?’ I said.

  ‘What do you want with a mirage?’

  ‘Nothing particularly. I was just trying to make pleasant conversation with a native.’

  ‘Bitch!’

  ‘Sheikh!’

  ‘Tart!’

  ‘Camel boy!’

  ‘Oh Helen!’ He had stood up again and was now crushing his lips against mine. He moved backwards with me to the bunk, laying the top half of my body on top of it. Then, with his right hand, and with the careless effort of a man who can afford anything, he ripped, literally tore, my web-like panties from off my loins.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing!’ I said playfully.

  ‘I’m going to f – you!’

  ‘Again?’

  He answered me in fact, penetrating my warm sheath in the same buccaneering fashion. Our movements were quick and passionate. As his passion rose into me, there was a discreet knoc
k on the door.

  ‘Da . . . amn!’ he said breathlessly. ‘We’ve arrived!’

  ‘You have indeed,’ I said drily. ‘And now would you mind going up on deck while I clean up and get dressed?’

  For a reason I didn’t understand then, Youssef was unwilling to pass even one night in a hotel in Algiers. We drove straight from the harbour to Blida, where we went to the house of a friend of his. We passed the evening charmingly, listening to singing and watching an extremely sensual Arab dancer.

  Next morning, we continued on our journey, the destination of which he refused to disclose to me.

  I told him that I didn’t have a great deal of time, that I would have to fly to Paris within a week but that I would rejoin him as soon as possible. He was very offhand about it but said that I could get an aeroplane from the interior.

  A few days later, we abandoned the car and took to camels. There were probably twenty camels in the train. I found it amusing but rather tiring.

  At one point a strange thing happened. I could have sworn I saw another white woman one time when we were camped by an oasis. Youssef laughed and said that I had seen my ‘mirage.’ I dismissed the incident from my mind immediately. I was content to enjoy my present happiness, the strangely exhilarating quality of the desert, fold upon fold of sand sweeping away to mauve imprecision on the horizon, and the nights on warm rugs in the gaudy tent with my lover, now wearing Arab clothes, and more passionate and lustful than ever. The thought occurred to me occasionally that there might be another white woman in the caravan, but it made no difference to me. Even if she was Youssef’s mistress, what did it matter? I don’t remember ever being jealous of a man.