It was such a joy, certainly one of the greatest joys I have ever experienced, for though I was grasping her neck with both hands (when and how they got there I couldn't tell), the fear, feeding on uncanny resemblances and echoes, as well as hate and anger implicit in our relationship, which induced so much shame and guilt and prevented me from enjoying the moment at hand, always reminding me of something old and familiar — all these feelings simply vanished, disappeared without a trace; I wanted simply to devour that lovely mouth and have that mouth engulf my body with its kisses. I did not dare hold her tight, because my light robe and silk pajamas would not keep down my powerful erection; my hands became an instrument of tenderness whose sole aim was to nestle her head in the gentlest, most comfortable position possible; her mouth transformed the force of my hatred into that of possession; fingers no longer wanted to squeeze and choke but to raise up, to make it easy for her to kiss and to explore with her tongue; though my consciousness tried to maintain control over itself, I couldn't say just when I closed my eyes or when she wrapped her arms around my neck, as if two dark orbs were flowing, sliding wetly into each other; still, a vestige of fear ran through me, attributable perhaps more to jealousy, since I didn't understand how she could kiss like an experienced lover, and at the same time I sensed that this was not experience at all but what she was giving me was the purest of instincts, and her purity affected me more than any experience possibly could; I was the one who, relying on my experience in love, wouldn't allow myself to yield to her fully; cunningly, and with a certain superiority, I merely tolerated her explorations and advances without really kissing her back; by unexpectedly and deliberately delaying my responses, by surprising her lips and her teeth with the tip of my tongue, or by actually obstructing the path of her tongue, I was enjoying her confusion and arousing further her desire for us to merge into one; what I really wanted was for her to abandon the last retreats of her modesty and shame and be totally at my mercy, which we both needed then — all the more so because the sober part of my consciousness had to realize that neither of us could stop or delay the chain of events without some risk; we would have to cope with the lengthy, intricate act of undressing, which would require all the reserves of skill and delicacy I still possessed, and the embarrassment of fumbling with buttons and strings and hooks would become a delicious new source of pleasure, a titillating memory only later, after the two naked bodies had already become one.
I may have planned out my every move, skillfully, sensibly, but there came a moment when I lost all my good sense, and now that I'm long past such matters and try to recall the events of that sunny morning with the detachment of an analyst observing his own activities, I realize that at this very juncture I run into the impassable barriers to free expression and have to crack that stone wall with my skull; and it's by no means modesty alone, obligatory and thus in many ways quite laughable, that makes my undertaking questionable: though it's not easy to call by their name the things that in daily life have their overused and hackneyed appellations, these words, denoting certain organs, functions, and motions, for all their spicy, down-to-earth vitality and expressiveness, cannot be used to describe my experiences, and not because I'd be afraid to transgress against bourgeois propriety — I couldn't care less about that; my task here is to give an account of my life, and middle-class decorum can be only the framework for such a life; if for this final reckoning I wish to chart as precisely as possible the map of my life's emotional events, then I should be able to spread out before me my own body, and no amount of squeamishness should hold me back from scrutinizing it in all its nakedness, just as it would be ludicrous to tell the coroner not to remove the sheet covering the body on his table; in other words, I should be able to remove my robe and pajamas and her fussily beautiful dress here and now, just as I did then and there, while naming every gesture and emotion in the process; but after some reflection, I must say that to use common words to describe the so-called immodest parts of the body — and, since we are talking about a living body and its quite natural functions — would be as ridiculous and false as it would be to change the subject politely; to demonstrate the true dimensions of the problem and the difficulty of finding a solution, if I were to ask myself the question as a kind of test: "So tell me, my dear, on that sunny morning, did you finally fuck your fiancée?" I could answer in the affirmative, but that would be no less a deceptive oversimplification or generalization as it would be to say nothing, because this word of affirmation would help to gloss over crucial details, just as silence would; yet narcissistic curiosity, interested only in details concealed and deemed unworthy of attention, finds it difficult to form a clear picture of its object, which is itself, because the body loses self-awareness precisely at those moments when it could be most revealing; consequently, memory cannot retain what the body had not been aware of, allowing crucial gestures to slip away, though it also endows them with a very special air, as the memory of a fainting spell can preserve only the curious sensations of losing and then regaining consciousness while the fainting itself, most intriguing to us, for it's a state like no other, remains inaccessible, unknowable.
Helene simply enclosed my lips with a bite, and this final decisive act, the only possible response to my little game of studied aloofness, luckily blurred the last sober bit of my consciousness, or so I believe now, after the fact, yes, I believe that the pain caused by this bite was the last sensation whose meaning and significance I could still register with some clarity, and which later enabled me to slip into a now barely remembered state of oblivion, for not only had her mouth abandoned all shyness and reticence by then, it also let me know in no uncertain terms that she wanted me, all of me, and would stand for no more delay or fuss, so it made no sense for me to play the seducer highly skilled in the techniques of love; she wanted me just as I was, she clung to me and would have me forget how I thought I should behave, all she wanted was to press her hips to mine, and not even the formidable layers of lace and silk undergarments could prevent us from feeling each other's body heat— although that, while making me very happy, strangely enough also aroused in me a feeling of humiliation, for by seeming to take control of our fate and by proving that my tongue's predictably unpredictable games were clumsy experiments compared to the eloquent testimony of her teeth, she may have cast doubt on my manhood or anyway deliberately offended my male vanity; as if exchanging roles, she became manfully aggressive, which of course I enjoyed very much, though in light of her decisiveness I appeared to myself as girlishly teasing and flirtatious and thus had to overpower her; my instincts, my conditioning refused to accept the exchange, and perhaps the deeply unconscious motive behind that bite was to arouse in me this wish to reassert myself; even my hatred returned, I felt like snatching her off me as one tears leeches off one's body; I grabbed her hair, the soft material of her dress, maybe even grazed her skin, and with a single jerk of my head I withdrew my mouth from hers; reaching lower with my hand, I grasped her buttocks and thrust her groin brutally against mine, letting her know in the most indelicate possible manner what I had been concealing in my pajama pants, under my robe; with lips and teeth, with bites of my own, I was now ready to take possession of her mouth, pushing in my tongue unimpeded, to which she responded, already on the floor, most tenderly, with even hand strokes and caresses of her tongue — I have no idea how we ended up on the floor, for by then I seemed to have lost the thread of our story, and perhaps this is the juncture after which only her gestures, features, the taste of her saliva, the smell of her perspiration, and the look of her fluttering eyelids allow me to surmise what might have happened to me.