The Tides of Lust

by Samuel Delany

  Wait.

  The hand working. (Sometimes . . .)

  “Suck it.”

  Benny shrugged, turned on his knees between Proctor’s boots. Proctor stood up, looking at the captain. He put his hands in his pockets. Benny opened the fly halfway. Proctors separating fists ran the zipper the rest down.

  The cock came out like a grey-mained bronc, and disappeared in Benny’s face.

  The captain drank half his coffee. Walked over. Pulled out Proctor’s testicles. The shaft slicked in and out of Benny’s mouth. The captain kneaded his own crotch. He touched Proctor’s buttocks.

  Benny’s brown fingers twined the captain’s black ones. Without letting Proctor’s cock slip, Benny pulled at the captain’s fly: hand in.

  And the captain had pulled the artist’s pants down over the buttocks. Proctor’s belt came apart. Black fingers pried. “I’m going to fuck you, Proctor.”

  Benny came off long enough to say, “Go on, Cap. He likes black cock. A whole bunch of nigger fishermen come up here on weekends, get drunk, and fuck him while I go down on him.”

  “Drunk niggers let you alone to suck?”

  Benny ran his face around the captain’s haft. “After he gets it four or five times, I get an awful lot. Come on, tuck him, Captain.”

  The captain’s black head prodded.

  “That’s . . .” Proctor whispered, “. . . it.”

  And in. Pumping, the captain, arms locked across Proctor’s chest, looked down at Benny’s distended face. “The girl . . .” the captain whispered. “Tell me about the girl . . .”

  Benny tickled Proctor’s balls with one hand, reached through with the other to heft the black bag that swung below the impaled branch.

  “Catherine,” whispered Proctor, “hot little . . . bitch—Oh, fuck me, fuck the shit out of my ass, nigger!—she lives protected by priests, now. Ah—mistress to an archaic museum here at our cathedral. Suck it, Benny! She’s . . . ah . . . a recluse now, among yesterdays. I want to see her spread on an altar, worried by cocks of every size and color, running with come and urine . . .”

  “Ah . . .” the captain’s whisper. “Yes, that’s what you want. Ah . . . Ah . . . You must—” He put his bare foot between Proctor’s legs and moiled Benny’s unsheathed cock that the boy beat while his master toiled in his mouth. “. . . come with me!”

  Proctor grunted and swung his hips at Benny’s face. Benny held the black foot against himself. Proctor’s breath stormed by the captain’s ear.

  A snow storm on a pitchy night. Detonate a flash—

  The captain’s face fell, lips down, lay on the artist’s shoulder.

  Push the detonator, but no light. Shake the camera, in the cold. Still: no light—

  Proctor arched, with low grunts. The captain’s foot slipped in Benny’s lap.

  The captain raised his head, pulled out. He said, “Seven . . .” Proctor, putting his belt back through the front loops, frowns.

  —THE END—

  Black candles burned about the studio. The candleholder on the sill was a banal skull. On the corner of the table an interesting bronze dragon coiled and reared around its flickering wax.

  Proctor sat on the deerskin throw and leaned on the wall, forearms flattened on the points of his knees. His shirt was balled in the corner. The pelt tickled the edges of his boots.

  Benny and Niger played on the floor while the captain instructed.

  Proctor had stopped laughing, and now smiled. “You didn’t come when you fucked me,” he said.

  The captain gave a grunt, glanced back. He kicked at the two figures on the floor. “Hey, there. Give each other a rest.”

  Niger yipped. Benny pulled his mouth from the raw shaft. The black foreskin slipped forward to the bulge.

  “That’s right.” The captain buttoned his fly and walked over to the steps. “Didn’t want to bother you. I didn’t think you could tell.” He shrugged again.

  Proctor turned up his hands and returned a mock smile. “I’ve always wondered what the devil’s secret was.”

  “I’m the devil now?”

  “You’ll do.”

  “I’m tired out today,” the captain said.

  Proctor made a motion with his chin.

  The captain looked back.

  Benny and Niger were curled together. The long muzzle lay on the boy’s hip. Benny’s fist loosened before his eyes; his breath gentled.

  “You’ve tired them out. I think you must be the devil.”

  The captain grinned. Then he said, “I’ve come six times today. Is that why you think so?”

  “But you’ve faked seven. That’s the important one.”

  The captain laughed and sat on the lower step. “Tell me about Catherine.” He leaned back and put his elbow on the pelt to look up at the artist. “You say I must spill my next shot glass full before midnight?” He looked around the room.

  A square clock had been painted, in grisaille, with four human orifices, two male and two female, at noon, three, six and nine. The long hand was a penis, the short, a hirsute sack: they swung round the day.

  “It was from an old Coca Cola advertisement clock,” Proctor explained. “A healthy buck like you should be able to recuperate in the few hours left.”

  “Catherine,” the captain repeated. “Prime me out with tales of her, unless you yourself are too tired—”

  “I never tire. And seldom sleep.”

  “But your mind is on other things, yes?”

  “I am simply pondering the fact that man and the devil share equally in the rewards to be gleaned from their enduring relationship.”

  The captain waited the explanation.

  “The obviation of the knowledge that both are going to die. Man has devised three systems for effecting the oblivion necessary for sanity. First, the whole bourgeois preoccupation—such a very good word, ‘preoccupy’—with work and the objects of its reward. Second, the religious erection—ahem—of a moral, ethical, and ritual matrix that must absorb man’s consciousness to be efficacious. And third is the erotic life in which we have chosen to submerge ourselves. I say we; more accurately, you. The artist is perhaps the only one free to indulge in all three, religious, erotic, and ergonic, simply to fulfill his calling. He reports to the practitioners of each what is going on within the circles of the others. That is why society supports him, I suppose. And they are all, always, so fascinated to learn.”

  “Tell me about Catherine.”

  “An ordinary woman, really. An old friend. Somewhere in the nexus, ergonic, religious, erotic, there is the proof of human consciousness. We have done a tiny bit to free the darkeys in this country. But the devil is still very much our slave.”

  “Do you believe in the devil?” the captain asked.

  “No. But then, I don’t believe in black slavery, either.”

  To the captain’s frown, Proctor nodded.

  The captain asked, “Who are you, Proctor?” Candlelight on the black cheekbones, in the skin of the heavy lips; and the lips parted on a whisper: “Why are you here?”

  “What can I tell you?”

  “Much as you will.” The captain pressed his lips out so for a moment they thickened like a black pig’s snout. Then, apart again, they gave up low laughter.

  Over it, Proctor began: “Have you ever heard of me? My name, my work? I have something of a reputation, and I firmly believe a man must first be that. But you, yes, you just come to return a wallet an acquaintance of mine dropped by chance. Like Bull might; like Nazi.”

  The black face flickered: “Tell me about the places you’ve been that have tilted to dump you here.” Velvet . . . Suede . . .

  “Let me see. Let me wake Benny and get some more coffee. No. Never mind. The boy should sleep. I’ll get it myself.”

  (After minutes, Proctor returns to the deer skin; sits, sipping at the steaming cup.)

  “Listen. Yes, I will tell you, in a bit. Let me get comfortable. Ah, now . . . Well! Something of an academic prodigy, I
finished on scholarship, from a good, but small college, at eighteen; went on to graduate third in my class from medical school; but at the prospect of interning, I realized I was not meant to practice. It came with pain and a feeling of failure. That was the first time I doubted my public self. I retreated back into the university. The medical degree was my mark of failure—I was terrified of corpses, and even more of the live patients who filled the City Hospital’s emergency ward. Still, a foreign object in academe, my medical diploma awed the humanities professors. I was twenty-three when I took my Ph.D. in historical anthropology. (We did not really have the structuralists to contend with then.) The double doctorate is the most lucrative of combinations. I have never used it. With the grant that followed, I flung myself upon Europe within days of graduation, determined to be the most dissolute of tourists. Young Dr. John hitchhiked where he could have trained, ferried where he could have flown, itinerary dictated thoroughly by whim; I ate and slept deck passage on steamers all over the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. The reports that have come back to me of that time from those who knew me then are that I was personable, even engaging, lively, intense, and very dirty. I could have been called, if the word has meaning, innocent at eighteen. By twenty-three I had engaged in only the most desultory amorous experiences. But by twenty-five there was nothing I had not done. You see me now? No act I have committed since is not some variation or repetition of something done before I finished my first quarter century. It began, I remember, with liquor and the old woman who lived on the top floor of the house where I took an apartment near school. (And then, hadn’t I thought it ended the next morning with the sixteen year old girl, her granddaughter, who lived downstairs, and who had been an initiate since she was half that age?) On the continent, it blossomed. In the night alleys of the capitals of Europe I sold myself to old men and bought the favors of young women. I met the Count, and for him, shortly, supervised the entourage he traveled with, a harem of adolescent delinquents from the gutters of Madrid, Rome, Copenhagen, and Marseilles. He used to say I should have been named ‘Petronius.’ Everywhere we visited we brought sensuous, chaotic laughter, the hysteric merriment of the depraved. I hunted new girls to appease his boys who demanded such payment for servicing the Count himself. I hunted new boys to replace the ones lost through the general temperament of such young men, or to the police (all were thieves: half had passed time in correctional institutions), or the ones who had fallen out of favor with our master.

  “He abandoned us in Zurich.

  “I do not know why or for where. I had been with him for five months. That morning I looked into his room, dawn was just bruising the mist in the pale valley beyond the curtains. The revelry from last night’s party had reduced to the sobbing of one peasant girl of the neighborhood who had taken coffee with the Count and two of our rougher company the day before.

  “The Count, his clothing, his jewelry, his paintings, were gone. In truth, I felt neither shock nor surprise. I had always been paid amply: I myself left within the hour. The others? Where they went, I do not know. One of the girls, and three of the boys, I had even developed slight infatuations for, though I suppose I held my master in contempt. Still, I left. I recall I paused before Tossi, the great Moroccan, sprawled drunk across the chair arm, his workman’s pants at mid-shin, hands loose across a cock he boasted always stiff, even when he slept. I squatted between his knees and nuzzled him. I often gave him the same service Benny gives me—” (He gestured where the naked boy slept with the dog.) “—and Olaf or Pietro, the big blond Italian, would do for Tossi what you and the fishermen did for me. But Tossi grunted and pushed me away. Had he wakened I would have taken him with me. But he didn’t. The probable fate of the others? I’m sure the police apprehended them later. The money and the prestige of the Count held the law off us. Without him we were vulnerable. I knew that. So I left my favorite, drunken and doomed, without regret. Such departures are strange, and very easy.

  “You have asked me about the woman? Here she makes her first entrance into my wanderings. Let me introduce her by explaining that I moved down through Italy, keeping to smaller towns. A week from Zurich round me living with a grave digger and his son. Where the mother had gone, or, in truth, if there was actually blood between man and boy, I never knew for sure. The father, whose acquaintance I made in a narrow street lit by half a moon at midnight, had raised the child to his own tastes. They disinterred dead women, carried them to their shack—a print of the Virgin was tacked over the fire, and the roof leaked after any more than an hour’s rain steady—where, with dirty fingers, and stained teeth, father and son would bruise and tear the cold mouth, breasts, buttocks, and box. Though liking to lick, lip, and tongue the cool and putrid corpses, they preferred to give up their juice in something warm, wet and responding, while they groveled, growled and bit. Often they would perform this service for one another (reluctantly claimed the father), one on his knees, hugging the hips of the other, who lowered over the figure on the table flickering under the candles. But their real pleasure was to indulge the yellowing, lardy lumps together while somebody else—male or female, it was no matter—crouched for them. Often I saw their clotted hands meet, while man and boy exchanged congealed kisses, tongueing a bit of fat between them.

  “I met Guido, the grave digger, as I say, in a dark street. His black eyes followed mine, pulled me around. After I had taken him in a doorway, he asked me if I liked to do the same for boys, say one fourteen. As we walked, he let that young Pietro was his son and helper. When he revealed to me where the stains on his fourth-hand army coat and woolen pants had come from, I grew intrigued. By the time we reached the cemetery and their hut, Guido had tested my reaction with a dozen false tales of what might be expected of me—sometimes exaggerating well beyond anything I ever witnessed later, sometimes not quite reaching it. Finally, we stepped through the shack door, and young Pietro—blue eyes in a rat’s face pocked with acne—released his teeth from the throat bared on the table, and blinked (some of his teeth were broken: his father’s, all large and intact; indeed handsome and dark at forty, Guido’s hair was completely black). They invited me to assist.

  “I stayed with them a month. They worked hard at their day labors. At dawn the night’s pleasure object was reconcealed in the earth. But during funerals, leaning on their spades, out of earshot of the mourners, they would joke and nudge one another like two rowdies stealing glimpses through the door of a ladies’ gymnasium. They were abominably paid. Three times, that hard month, with much joking, Guido, after he and Pietro had satisfied themselves, took the cleaver from the mantle and retained part of a thigh for roasting. I ate with them.

  “I passed my days in town. The reason why I did not stay with them more than a month? I made the acquaintance of Catherine. Across the street (she sat, o continental banality, in a cafe), from her dress and carriage, I assumed her ten years or more my senior, or I don’t believe I would have approached her (I merely went to ask some point of information or direction). But she turned, I stayed to talk; and she was twenty-five. She knew much more of the strange world I had chosen for myself than I. (And now, when near another quarter century has passed, and my hair is white, one might easily think she has not so aged from then.) We met with an exchange of information, which is the only way such meetings could be effected in Europe of that day. It developed into a confident relationship over several afternoons’ pastry and demitasse. On our third meeting she invited me to her home. And I learned she was Catherine, Duchessa di Monsalvaggio. The fact that I was a bright, young American, not a year out of school, and therefore still within the European status of student, helped excuse our friendship in the eyes of il Duce, a wealthy businessman, and his senile and provincial parents. He had brought the title to the marriage; she, from Salt Lake City, the money. Oh yes, the duke had as well brought her a stepson, within days of Pietro’s age. Certainly more prepossessing than Pietro, and closer to me in education, he still struck me as insufferably dull. And a
gainst his brilliant and witty step-mother, he made a poor showing. But he was occupied with his tutor most of the week.

  “As I began to meet the middle classes of the town, tolerant of my poor clothes for the novelty of my alien intellect, I began to pick up the inevitable rumors that run about such persons as the Duchessa Catherine. Contradictions are their essence. She was a deeply wise woman—her mentality was exhausted in merely conversational wit, verbal veneer. She was the best of wives to il Duce and on three occasions had saved his newly grown fortunes—their marriage was only show, and she had forbidden her husband to touch her since a miscarriage some years past; now she took satisfaction with only the lowest men, most of them strangers that the duke himself first welcomed to the house; then, anywhere from next month-to-morning, said stranger would be expelled from the town with direst threats. I began to discover the truth of all these during an afternoon when the duke suggested over coffee in the south gardens that I and the Duchessa go riding. He would nap. We went to bridle the horses. The stable man was asleep, as it was the Italian siesta—a custom that Catherine prided herself on not observing. As she was harnessing her mare, the horse reared. She fell back. I caught her shoulders and felt her wriggle against me, as she tried to catch balance. She felt my response: her breath quickened. I kissed her ear.

  “I pushed my tongue in her ear. Her breathing stopped. I laughed; and her hand reached mine. Then, with her brown hair falling all over me, I lay with her in the hay beneath the mare who pawed above us and winnied at our love-making. I held her face between my hands between my legs; she sucked. I had her front, finished her back; she panted and clutched the straw.

  “Later we lay there, talking lazily, and the talk became personal: she told me of her ‘indiscretions,’ and I recounted some of my travels—I edited them; nevertheless, I made her titter with excitement when I described Tossi and the peasant girl at the last party at Zurich, or what Olaf had forced the Count to do when the young Swedish sailor was drunk one morning; the older man had protested then, but confided his pleasure to me later. She vowed she would have done the same as he. Then, on caprice, I told her of my present situation. When I recounted how I passed my nights, she was enthralled. Remembering my hosts’ claim that they cared not the sex of who sucked, I challenged her curiosity with an invitation. The Duchessa’s tale about the general and the three soldiers had convinced me numbers would not disturb her, nor observers distract her.