XX&X

“Suddenly I became conscious that she was looking me full in the face, with a peculiar expression, her eyes very wide open, then, shutting them “Oho-oho”, she said with a prolonged sigh, do – oh, take away – oh – your hand, Walter dear, – oh I shall be ill, – oho, – oho,” then her head dropped down over my shoulder as I knelt in front of her; at the same moment, her thighs seemed to open slightly, then shut, then open with a quivering, shuddering motion, as it then seemed to me, and then she was quite quiet.”

“You put an aureole on vice, provided only if it is honest. Your ideal is a daring courtesan of genius. Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a woman to her very last fiber.”

“Finally a woman confesses! Confess what? What women never allowed themselves to confess. What men always criticized on them: they only obey the blood and everything is sex on them, even the spirit.”

“The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison.”

“I lay on the bed and watched him put on dark socks, clean Y-fronts, a laundered white shirt, dark blue trousers with red side-tapes like the soldier I still wanted him to be. Then he took the shirt off again, and smiled at me sweetly as he put on his high-collared blue uniform jacket over his bare skin. I was stunned by his body, but thrilled to see him dressed up, warm and hard, privately beautiful in his uniform. He say down again to lace up soft-soled black shoes, and leant over me before going and kissed me with a charming assumed air, as if I were a country girl with whom he had enjoyed a night of passion before riding off to join his regiment at dawn.”

“Now, disengag’d from the shirt, I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant.”

In a trice, she liberated his sexual weapon, and her eyes widened with amazement at the sight.”

“I would tell him how he almost made us lose interest in passion by his obsession with the gestures empty of their emotions, and how we reviled him, because he almost caused us to take vows of chastity, because what he wanted us to exclude was our own aphrodisiac — poetry.”

“I can lift desire in my fingers like this small bud of a breast.”

“I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn’t love.”

“I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it’s painful gall-stones, it’s gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul.”