You obey her.
The chamber begins to glow with warm luminosity, the color of new grass, a light like ground emeralds: the mask has slits at the level of the eyes; you look at Celestina, masked. She approaches, she removes your caftan, revealing your nakedness, the caftan falls to the floor. Naked, with the terrible stump of your mutilated arm. Celestina removes her necklaces and underskirts, her smock and sandals. Clothing and adornments slide to the floor: you are both naked, facing one another, so long since you have made love to a woman, she looks at you, you look at her, you come together, you embrace her with tenderness; she embraces you with passion.
The masks fall. The light born of your masked gazes remains. You lead Celestina to the bed. You kiss one another, slowly, caress one another, she kisses your whole body, you kiss her whole body, you tell yourself you are re-creating one another with your touch, she with her two hands, you with your one, you kiss one another’s lips, eyes, ears, her breath moistens the hair of your pubis, yours the young perfume of her armpits, your hand caresses one nipple, your lips moisten the other, she moans, she scratches your shoulder, she strokes your buttocks, sticks her finger in your asshole, her fingernails stroke the fascine of pleasure between your asshole and your balls, she lifts the weight of your heavy milk-pouch, you are over her, your legs spread apart, your tongue washes her navel, descends along her belly till your face is buried in the bronze locks of her mound, you nose through the curls, open a way with your tongue, through the hidden, elusive, quivering folds to the moist and palpitating clitoris, her lips, her tongue, her palate, her controlled little teeth devour your prick, she licks your testicles, places her tongue in your asshole, you spread your legs even wider, you seek the acid savor of her asshole, you leave it gleaming and moist as a copper coin abandoned in a rainy alleyway, you move apart from her, with your only hand you lift her legs, you place them on your shoulders and, very slowly, you enter, first the pulsing purple head, little by little, the rest of your prick, to the throat, to the frontier of pleasure, to the blackest and most submissive boundaries of the trembling cave, you do not want to come yet, think of something else, you want to wait, both together, something else, you lived once along the rue de Bièvre, the ancient beaver canal that flowed into the Seine, now a narrow little alley of quiet hawkers’ cries, the odor of couscous, the high laments of Arabic music, aged beggars, mischievous children, hopscotches drawn on the pavement, Dante lived there once, he wrote there, he began to write, Paris, the fountain of all wisdom and the source of the divine writings, where the persuasive Devil inculcated a perverse intelligence in some few wise men, the Inferno, you repeat the verses in silence, don’t come yet, nondum, not yet, midway along the journey of our lives, a dark wood, we lose our way, wilderness, harsh and cruel, the recollection of terror, that isn’t what you want to remember, more recent, not yet, a canto, nondum, the canto, the twenty-fifth canto, that’s it, ed eran due in uno, ed uno in due, the girl cries out, you say the verse aloud, due in uno, uno in due, she screams, closes her eyes, you look upon her face convulsed by the orgasm, her trembling thighs, her tempest-ridden sex, now, yes, now you come, with her, you flood her black, rosy, pearly, recessed cunt with silver and venom and smoke and amber, ed eran due in uno, ed uno in due, the pleasure is prolonged, the juices, the semen, the ocean, she is still shivering, you howl like a beast, you cannot withdraw, you do not want to withdraw, you sink into the woman’s flesh, the woman blends into the man’s flesh, two in one, one in two, your arm, your arm is beginning to grow, your hand, your hand is growing, fingernails, open palm, take, receive, again, let the lost half of your fortune, your love, your intelligence, your life and death reappear: you raise the arm you had lost, it isn’t your arm, the arm you scarcely remember, the arm you lost in a manhunt, Lepanto, Veracruz, the Cabo de los Desastres, my God, your arm is the girl’s arm, your body is the girl’s body, her body is yours; crazed, in that instant you look for the other body in the bed, you have not dreamed this, you have just made love to a woman in your bed in your room in the Hôtel du Pont-Royal, the girl is no longer here, yes, she is here, no, she is not, there is but one body, you look at it, you see yourself, your two hands touch full breasts, your erect nipples, your strange new hips, young and firm, your slender waist, your swelling buttocks, your hands, search, search with the terror of having lost the emblem of your manhood, you brush the mat of hair, seek … no, you touch your still-hard penis, moist and slippery, your exhausted, still-trembling testicles, you search further, below your balls, between your legs, you find it, your hole, your vagina, you insert your finger, it is deep, it is the same, the one you have just possessed, it is the one you will possess again, you speak, I love you, I love myself, your voice and the girl’s speak at the same time, they are a single voice, let me make love to you again, I want to make love again, you introduce your own long, new, pliant penis, sinuous as a serpent, into your own, open, pleasured, palpitating moist vagina; you make love to yourself, I make love to myself, I fertilize you, you fertilize me, I fertilize myself, my male and female selves, we shall have a son, then a daughter, they will make love, they will fertilize one another, they will have sons and daughters, and those sons and daughters will have sons and daughters, and the grandsons and granddaughters, great-grandsons and great-granddaughters, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, and the two shall be one flesh, and in joy thou shalt bring forth children, and blessed is the ground for thy sake, thorns and fruit shall it bring forth to thee, and in the smile of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return — without sin, and with pleasure.
Twelve o’clock did not toll in the church towers of Paris; but the snow ceased, and the following day a cold sun shone.
ESCH IS LUTHER To Carlos Fuentes by Milan Kundera
When, during January 1969, in Prague, in Wenceslas Square, a Czech student took his own life by fire to protest the Russian occupation of his country, I had the feeling that this horror did not belong to Czech history. There was no precedent for this act; it came from a terrible elsewhere.
Not the world war, not the concentration camps, not the Stalinist terror, but the burning corpse of Jan Palach filled me with a sense of the apocalypse.
A scholarly definition occurred to me: an act is moral if it can serve as an example for everyone; but how can one imitate a boy who immolated himself? Did not that act project us beyond Europe and the moral experience of Europe?
For weeks after his death, the streets of Czech cities were filled with excited demonstrators. One slogan inspired them: “Jan Palach is the Jan Hus of today.”
In fact, Jan Palach, an adolescent, bore no resemblance to Jan Hus, one of the great intellectuals of the fifteenth century. Hus did not want to die. Rather, this was the only course open to him if he wanted to remain faithful to himself and his beliefs. The example of Hus, burned as a heretic, is difficult but not impossible to follow. To imitate the other Jan is inconceivable.