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Obscene caresses

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An anonymous white hand stroked an anonymous phallus in one of the most unexceptionable caresses of love. Its obscenity lay in the fact that two people could lie and be photographed doing it. But it was the wrist of the right, the unscarred hand that was in the frame; and although it made a playful flute-fingering gesture, I was becoming more and more suspicious.

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The invitation

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There was the most brutally pornographic shot yet, down angled, of the girl lying on the bed. Once again it did not reveal her face, which was twisted back almost out of sight. It showed her waiting to receive the Negro, whose blurred dark back was close to the camera.

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Meanwhile

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Suddenly the quality of the film changed. It was shot, very jerkily, by a different camera in different circumstances. Two people in a crowded restaurant. With an acute shock, a flush of bitter anger, I saw who it was: Alison and myself, that first evening, in the Piraeus. There was a flash of blank film, then another shot of us, which for a moment I could not place. Alison walking down a steep village street, myself a yard or two behind her. We both looked exhausted; and though it was too far to see the facial expressions, one could tell from that gap between us, the way we walked, that we were miserable. I recognized it: our return to Arachova. The cameraman must have been hidden in a cottage, shooting from behind a shutter perhaps, because a transverse black bar obscured the end of the shot. I remembered the wartime sequence of Wimmel. I also recognized the implications; that we had been followed, watched and filmed throughout. It would not have been possible on the bare upper slopes of Parnassus, but in the trees… I remembered the pool, the sun on my naked back and Alison beneath me. It was too horrible, too blasphemous, that that, of all moments, could have been public.

Stripped, flayed by the knowledge; and their always knowing.

Blank film again. Then another title.

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The act of copulation

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But the film ran through a series of numbers and flashing white scratches: the end of the reel. There was a ffipping sound from the projector. The screen stared white. Someone ran in through the door and switched the projector off. I gave a grunt of contempt; I had been waiting for that failure of nerve, of the courage of their pornography. But the man—I saw by the faint light through the door that it was Adam—walked to the screen and lifted it aside. I was left alone again. For thirty seconds or so the room remailled in darkness. Then light came from behind the curtains.

Someone began to pull them, from behind, by cords, as they do for plays in parish halls. When they were about two-thirds open, they stopped; but long before that the parallel with parish halls had vanished. The light came from a shade hung from the ceiling. It let no light through, so that the illumination was thrown down in a brilliant, intimate cone onto what lay beneath.

A low couch, covered by a huge golden-tawny rug, perhaps an Afghan carpet. On it, superbly white and completely naked, was Lily. She was lying against a mound of pillows, deep gold, amber, rose, maroon, themselves piled against an ornate gilt and carved headboard. She was turned sideways towards me in a deliberate imitation of Goya’s Maja Desnuda. Her hands behind her head, her nakedness offered. Not flaunted, but offered, stated as a divine and immemorial fact. A bare armpit, as sexual as a loin. Nipples the color of cornelians, as if they alone in all that cream-white skin had been, or could be, bitten and bruised. The tapering curves, thighs, ankles, small bare feet. And the level, unmoving eyes staring with a kind of arrogant calm into the shadows where I hung.

Beyond her, on the rear wall, had been painted an arcade of slender white arches. I thought at first that they were meant to represent Bourani; but they were too narrow, and had slender Moorish-ogive tops. Goya… the Alhambra? I realized the couch was not legless, but that the far end of the room was on a slightly lower level, rather like a Roman bath. The curtains had concealed further steps down.

The gleaming body lay in its greenish-tawny lake of light, without movement; and she stared at me as from a canvas. The tableau pose was held so long that I began to think this was the great finale; this living painting, this naked enigma, this forever unattainable.

I had assumed it was Lily, but I could not see the scar, and I began to waver. It was Lily; it was Rose; then Lily again. Minutes passed. The lovely body lay in its mystery. I could just see the imperceptible swell of her breathing… or could I? For a few moments it was neither Lily nor Rose. I was looking at a magnificently lifelike wax effigy.

But then she moved.

Her head turned in profile and her right arm reached out gracefully and invitingly, in the classical gesture of Récamier, to whoever had switched on the light and drawn open the curtain. A new figure appeared.

It was Joe.

He was in a tunic of indeterminate period, a semi-toga, pure white, lined heavily with gold. He went and stood behind the couch. Rome? An empress and her slave? He stared at me, or towards me, for a moment, and I knew he could not be meant to be a slave. He was too majestic, too darkly noble. He possessed the room, the stage, the woman. He looked down at her and she looked up, a grave affection; the swan neck. He took her outstretched hand.

Suddenly I understood who they were; and who I was; how prepared, this moment. I too had a new role. I tried then desperately to get rid of the gag, by biting, by yawning, by rubbing my head against my arms. But it was too tight.

The Negro knelt beside her, kissed her shoulder. A slim white arm framed and imprisoned his dark head. A long moment. Then she sank back. He surveyed her, slowly ran a hand down from her neck to her waist. As if she were silk. As slow as a connoisseur, sure of the white surrender. Then he calmly stood up and unbrooched his toga at the shoulder.

I shut my eyes.

Nothing is true; everything is permitted.

Conchis: His part is not ended yet.

I opened my eyes again.

There was no perversion, no attempt to suggest that I was watching anything else but two people who were in love making love; as one might watch two boxers in a gymnasium or two acrobats on a stage. Not that there was anything acrobatic or violent about them. He was tender with her, she was tender with him, and they behaved as if to show that the reality was the very antithesis of the absurd nastiness in the film.

For long moments I shut my eyes, refusing to watch, to accept this corrosively evil role. But then always I seemed forced, a voyeur in hell, to raise my head and look again. My arms began to go numb, an additional torture. The two figures on the lion-colored bed, the luminously pale and the richly dark, embraced, re-embraced, oblivious of me, of all except their enactment.

What they did was in itself without obscenity, merely private, familiar; a biological ritual that takes place a hundred million times every night the world turns. But I tried to imagine what could make them bring themselves to do it in front of me; what incredible argument Conchis used; what they used to themselves. Lily now seemed to me as far ahead of me in time as she had at first started behind; somehow she had learnt to lie with her body as other people could lie only with their tongues. Perhaps she wanted some state of complete sexual emancipation, and the demonstration of it was more necessary to her as self-proof than its exhibition was to me as my already supererogatory “disintoxication.”