I thought of Melanie whom normally, were I planning a book of my life, I would never have bothered to include. How had she managed to inject herself when ordinarily I scarcely gave her a thought? What was the significance of this intrusion? What had she to contribute? Two touchstones fell immediately into my lap. Melanie? Why yes, remember always «beauty» and «insanity.» And why should I remember beauty and insanity? Then there came to mind these words: «varieties of flesh.» This was followed by the most subtle divagations on the relation between flesh, beauty and insanity. What was beautiful in Melanie derived from her angelic nature; what was insane in her derived from the flesh. The fleshly and the angelic had parted ways, and Melanie, as inexplicably beautiful as a crumbling statue, was slowly expiring on the frontier. (There were hysterical types who also succeeded in isolating the flesh, giving it thereby a peculiar life of its own. But with them it was always possible to plug in the fuse, to restore the current, to put the mind in control again. They kept a shutter in the mind which, like the asbestos curtain in the theatre, could be unrolled in case of fire or as indication that another act had come to an end.) Melanie was like some strange naked creature, half-human, half-divine, whose whole time was spent in vainly trying to climb from the orchestra pit to the stage. In her case it made little difference whether the show was on or off, whether it was a rehearsal, an entr’acte, or a silent empty house. She clambered about with the repulsive seductiveness of the insane in their nakedness. The angels may wear tiaras or brown derbies, according to their whims, if we are to believe the vagaries of certain visionaries, but they have never been described as insane. Neither has their nakedness ever been a provocation to lust. But Melanie could be as ridiculous as a Swedenborgian angel and as provocative as a ewe in heat to the sight of a lonely shepherd. Her white hair served only to enhance the rippling allure of her flesh; her eyes were jet black, her bosom firm and full, her haunch like a magnetic field. But the more one reflected on her beauty the more obscene her insanity appeared. She gave the illusion of moving about naked, of inviting you to finger her so that she might laugh in that low, eerie way which the demented have of registering their unpredictable reactions. She haunted me like a danger signal glimpsed from a train window at night when one suddenly wonders if the engineer is awake or asleep. Just as one wonders in such moments, too paralyzed with fear to move or speak, what the precise nature of the catastrophe will be, so in thinking of Melanie’s insane beauty I often gave myself up to ecstatic dreams of flesh, the varieties I had known and explored and the varieties yet to be discovered. To embark unrestrainedly on carnal adventures awakens the sense of danger. I had experienced more than once the terror and the fascination which the pervert knows when in the crowded subway he submits to the compulsion of stroking a tempting ass or squeezing the seductive teat which lies within reach of his fingers.
The element of awareness acted not only as a partial control, enabling me to move with imaginative feet from one escalator to another, but it served a more important purpose still—it stimulated the desire to commence the work of creation. That Melanie whom I had heretofore ignored, whom I had regarded as a mere cipher in the complicated sum of experiences, could prove such a rich vein, opened my eyes. It was not Melanie at all, as a matter of fact, but those word-clots («beauty,» «insanity,» «varieties of flesh») which I felt the need to explore and clothe in sumptuous style. Even if it took years to do so, I would remember this train of fabulation, capture its secret, expose it on paper. How many hundred women had I pursued, followed like a lost dog, in order to study some mysterious trait—a pair of eyes set far apart, a head hewn out of quartz, a haunch that seemed to live its own life, a voice as melodious as the warble of a bird, a cataract of hair falling like spun-glass, a torso invested with the flexibility of rubber…. Whenever the beauty of the female becomes irresistible it is traceable to a single quality. This quality, often a physical defect, can assume such unreal proportions that in the mind of the possessor her staggering beauty is nil. The excessively attractive bust can become a double-headed maggot that bores into the brain and becomes a mysterious watery tumor; the tempting overfull lips can grow in the depths of the skull like a double vagina, bringing on that most difficult of all diseases to cure: melancholia. (There are beautiful women who almost never stand before the mirror nude, women who, when they think of the magnetic power which the body wields, become terrified and shrink into themselves, fearful that even the odor which they give off will betray them. There are others who, standing before the mirror, can scarcely restrain themselves from rushing outdoors stark naked and offering themselves to the first comer.)
Varieties of flesh…. Before sleep, just as the eyelids close down over the retina and the unbidden images begin their nocturnal parade… That woman in the subway whom you followed into the street: a nameless phantom now suddenly reappearing, advancing towards you with lithe, vigorous loins. Reminds you of someone, someone just like that, only with a different face. (But ‘ the face was never important!) You have the memory of the ripple and flash of loins just as strong as you have somewhere in your brain the image of the bull you saw when a child: the bull in the act of mounting a cow. Images come and go, and always it is some particular part of the body which stands out, some identification mark. Names—names fade out. The endearing phrases— they too fade out. Even the voice, that which was so potent, so undoing, so altogether personal—that too has a way of vanishing, of becoming lost in all the other voices. But the body lives on, and the eyes, and the fingers of the eyes, remember. They come and go, the unknown, unnamed, mingling as freely with the others as if they were an integral part of one’s life. With the unknown ones comes the remembrance of certain days, certain hours, the voluptuous way they eased into a blank moment of lassitude. You remember just how the tall one in a mauve silk dress stood that afternoon, when the sun beat down with smouldering warmth, and gazed entranced at the play of water in the fountain. You remember exactly the way your hunger expressed itself at the time—sharp, quick, like a knife-blade between the shoulders, then dying away almost as quickly, but in such pleasurable smoke, like a deep nostalgic whiff. And then another one rises up, heavy, stolid, with the porous skin of sand-stone; with her everything is centered in the head, the head which does not fit the body, the head which is volcanic, still filled with eruption. They come and go like that, clear, precise, trailing the ambiance of the collision, radiating their instantaneous effects. All kinds, all tempered by texture, weather, mood: metallic ones, marble figurines, translucent shadowy ones, flowerlike ones, svelte animals covered with pelts of suede, trapeze artists, silver sheets of water rising in human form and bending like Venetian glass. Leisurely you undress them, examine them under the microscope, bid them sway, bend, flex the knees, roll over, spread their legs. You talk to them, now that your lips are unsealed. What were you doing that day? Do you always wear your hair like that? What were you going to tell me when you stared at me that way? Could I ask you to turn around? That’s it. Now cup your breasts with two hands. Yes, I could have thrown myself on you that day. I could have fucked you right on the sidewalk, and people stepping all over us. I could have fucked you into the ground, buried you there near the lake where you were sitting with legs crossed. You knew I was watching you. Tell me… tell me because nobody will ever know… what were you thinking then, that very moment? Why did you keep your legs crossed? You knew I was waiting for you to open them. You wanted to open them, didn’t you? Tell me the truth! It was warm and you had nothing on under your dress. You had come down from your perch to get a. bit of air, hoping that something would happen. You didn’t much care what happened, did you? You
