She led me to another hotel where we were to pass the night together. We sat talking awhile in the lugubrious dining room over a glass of beer. She looked queer in that mackintosh—like a person who’s been driven out of the house by fire in the middle of the night. We were itching to get to bed but in order not to arouse suspicion we had to pretend to be in no great hurry. I had lost all sense of place: it seemed as if we had made a rendezvous in a dark room by the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of an exodus. Two or three other couples slipped in noiselessly, sipped their drinks, and chatted furtively in subdued whispers. A man walked through with a bloody meat cleaver, holding a decapitated chicken by the legs; the blood dripped on to the floor, leaving a zigzag trail—like the passage of a drunken whore who is menstruating freely.
Finally we were shown to a cell at the end of a long corridor. It was like the terminus of a bad dream, or the missing half of a Chirico painting. The corridor formed the axis of two wholly unrelated worlds; if you were to go left instead of right you might never find your way back again. We undressed and fell on the iron cot in a sexual sweat. We went at it like a pair of wrestlers who have been left to untangle themselves in an empty arena after the lights are out and the crowd dispersed. Mara was struggling frantically to bring on an orgasm. She had somehow become detached from her sexual apparatus; it was night and she was lost in the dark; her movements were those of a dreamer desperately struggling to re-enter the body which had begun the act of surrender. I got up to wash myself, to cool it off with a little cold water. There was no sink in the room. In the yellow light of an almost extinct bulb I saw myself in a cracked mirror; I had the expression of a Jack the Ripper looking for a straw hat in a pisspot. Mara lay prone on the bed, panting and sweating; she had the appearance of a battered odalisque made of jagged pieces of mica. I slipped into my trousers and staggered through the funnel-like corridor in search of the wash-room. A bald-headed man, stripped to the waist, stood before a marble basin washing his trunk and arm-pits. I waited patiently until he had finished. He snorted like a walrus in performing his ablutions; when he had done he opened a can of talcum powder and sprinkled it generously over his torso which was creased and caked like an elephant’s hide.
When I returned I found Mara smoking a cigarette and playing with herself. She was burning up with desire. We went at it again, trying it dog-fashion this time, but still it was no go. The room began to heave and bulge, the walls were sweating, the mattress which was made of straw was almost touching the floor. The performance began to take on all the aspects and proportions of a bad dream. From the end of the corridor came the broken wheeze of an asthmatic; it sounded like the tail end of a gale whizzing through a corrugated rat hole.
Just as she was about to come we heard some one ‘ fumbling at the door. I slid off her and poked my head out. It was a drunk trying to find his room. A few minutes later, when I went to the wash-room to give my cock another cool spritz-bath, he was still looking for his room. The transoms were all open and from them come a stertorous cacophony which resembled the Epiphany of John the locust-eater. When I returned to resume the ordeal my cock felt as if it were made of old rubber bands. I had absolutely no more feeling at that end; it was like pushing a piece of stiff suet down a drain-pipe. What’s more, there wasn’t another charge left in the battery; it anything was to happen now it would be in the nature of gall and leathery worms or a, drop of pus in a solution of thin pot cheese. What surprised me was that it continued to stand up like a hammer; it had lost all the appearance of a sexual implement; it looked disgustingly like a cheap gadget from the five and ten cent store, like a bright-colored piece of fishing tackle minus the bait. And on this bright and slippery gadget Mara twisted like an eel. She wasn’t any longer a woman in heat, she wasn’t even a woman; she was just a mass of undefinable contours wriggling and squirming like a piece of fresh bait seen upside down through a convex mirror in a rough sea.
I had long ceased to be interested in her contortions; except for the part of me that was in her I was as cool as a cucumber and remote as the dog star. It was like a long distance death message concerning some one whom you had forgotten long ago. All I was waiting for was to feel that incredibly aborted explosion of wet stars which drop back to the floor of the womb like dead snails.
Towards dawn, Eastern Standard Time, I saw by that frozen condensed milk expression about the jaw that it was happening. Her face went through all the metamorphoses of early uterine life, only in reverse. With the last dying spark it collapsed like a punctured bag, the eyes and nostrils smoking like toasted acorns in a slightly wrinkled lake of pale skin. I fell off her and dove straight into a coma which ended towards evening with a knock on the door and fresh towels. I looked out the window and saw a collection of tar-covered roofs spotted here and there with doves of taupe. From the ocean front came the boom of surf followed by a frying pan symphony of exasperated sheet metal cooling off in a drizzle at 139 degrees Centigrade. The hotel was droning and purring like a fat and moribund swamp fly in the solitude of a pine forest. Along the axis of the corridor there had been a further sag and recess during the interim. The Grade A world to the left was all sealed and boarded, like those colossal bath houses along the boardwalk which, in the off season, curl up on themselves and expire in gasps through endless chinks and slats. The other nameless world to the right had already been chewed off by a triphammer, the work doubtless of some maniac who had endeavored to justify his existence as a day laborer. Underfoot it was slimy and slippery, as if an army of zippered seals had been weaving it back and forth to the wash-room all day long. Here and there an open door revealed the presence of grotesquely plastic water nymphs who had managed to squeeze their mammiferous trundles of avoirdupois into sylph-like fish nets made of spun glass and ribbons of wet clay. The last roses of Summer were fading away into goiterous udders with arms and legs. Soon the epidemic would be over and the ocean would resume its air of gelatinous grandeur, of mucilaginous dignity, of sullen and spiteful solitude.
We stretched ourselves out in the hollow of a suppurating sand dune next to a bed of waving stink weed on the lee side of a macadamized road over which the emissaries of progress and enlightenment were rolling along with that familiar and soothing clatter which accompanies the smooth locomotion of spitting and farting contraptions of tin woven together by steel knitting needles. The sun was setting in the West as usual, not in splendor and radiance however but in disgust, like a gorgeous omelette engulfed by clouds of snot and phlegm. It was the ideal setting for love, such as the drug stores sell or rent between the covers of a handy pocket edition. I took off my shoes and leisurely deposited my big toe in the first notch of Mara’s crotch. Her head was pointed south, mine north; we pillowed them on folded hands, our bodies relaxed and floating effortlessly in the magnetic drift, like two enormous twigs suspended on the surface of a gasoline lake. A visitor from the Renaissance, coming upon us unexpectedly, might well have assumed that we had become dislodged from a painting depicting the violent end of the mangy retinue of a sybaritic Doge. We were lying at the edge of a world in ruins, the composition being a rather precipitate study of perspective and foreshortening in which our prostrated figures served as a picaresque detail.
The conversation was thoroughly desultory, spluttering out with a dull thud like a bullet encountering muscle and sinew. We weren’t talking, we were simply parking our sexual implements in the free parking void of anthropoid chewing gum machines on the edge of a gasoline oasis. Night would fall poetically over the scene,
