Anaïs Nin - Delta of Venus

About an hour’s drive away, there was an abandoned farm they had once rented out. It had fallen into disuse, and now Pierre decided he wanted to have it repaired for the day John married. Before calling in the workmen, he and Martha went together to look it over and see what needed to be done.

It was a very big one-story house. A mass of ivy had almost completely smothered it, covering the windows with a natural curtain, darkening the interior. Pierre and Martha opened a window. They found much dust, the furniture musty and a few rooms ruined where the rain had come in. But one room was nearly intact. It was the master bedroom. A big, somber bed, many draperies, mirrors and a worn carpet gave it, in the semi-darkness, a certain grandeur. Over the bed a heavy velvet cover had been thrown.

Pierre, looking around with the eye of an architect, sat on the edge of the bed. Martha stood near him. The summer warmth came into the room in waves, stirring their blood. Again Martha felt this invisible hand caressing her. It did not seem strange to her that a real hand should suddenly be slipping among her clothes, with the same gentleness and softness as the summer wind, touching her skin. It seemed natural and pleasant; she closed her eyes.

Pierre drew her body toward him and stretched her on the bed. She kept her eyes closed. This seemed merely like the continuation of a dream. Lying alone for many summer nights, she had been expecting this hand, and it was doing all that she had expected. It was stealing softly through her clothes, stripping her of them as if they were a light skin to be peeled, setting free the real, warm skin. The hand moved all over her, to places she had not even known it would go, to secret places, which were throbbing.

Then suddenly she opened her eyes. She saw the face of Pierre right over her face preparing to kiss her. She sat up brusquely. While her eyes were closed she had imagined it was John who was stealing thus into her flesh. But when she saw Pierre’s face, she was disappointed. She escaped from him. They returned home silent, but not angry. Martha was like a drugged person. She could not rid herself of the sensation of Pierre’s hand on her body. Pierre was tender, and seemed to understand her resistance. They found John rigid and sullen.

Martha was unable to sleep. Every time she dozed off she began to feel the hand again, to await its movements, as it came up her leg and worked its way to the secret place where she had felt a throbbing, an expectancy. She got up and stood by the window. Her whole body was crying out for this hand to touch her again. It was worse than hunger or thirst, this yearning of the flesh.

The next day she rose pale and determined. As soon as lunch was over, she turned to Pierre and said, ‘We have to see about that farm today?’ He assented. They drove off. It was a relief. The wind struck her face and she was free now. She watched his right hand on the wheel of the car – a beautiful hand, youthful, supple, and tender. Suddenly she leaned over and pressed her lips on it. Pierre smiled at her with such a gratitude and joy that it made her heart leap to see it.

Together they walked through the tangled garden, up the moss-covered path, into the green dark room with its curtains of ivy. Straight to the large bed they walked, and it was Martha who stretched herself on it.

‘Your hands,’ she murmured, ‘oh, your hands, Pierre. I felt them all night.’

How suavely, how gently his hands began to search her body, as if he were searching for the place where her sensations were gathered and did not know whether it was around her breasts, or under her breasts, along her hips or in the valley between the hips. He waited for her flesh to respond, perceiving by the slightest tremor that his hand had touched the place she wanted to be touched. Her dresses, sheets, nightgowns, the water of her bath, the wind, the heat, everything had conspired to sensitize her skin until this hand fulfilled the caresses they all had given her, adding warmth and the power to penetrate the secret places everywhere.

But as soon as Pierre leaned over too close to her face to take a kiss, then the image of John interfered. She closed her eyes, and Pierre felt her body also closing against him. So with wisdom, he pursued his caresses no further.

When they returned home that day, Martha was filled with a kind of drunkenness that made her behave recklessly. The house was so arranged that Pierre and Sylvia’s apartment was connected to Martha’s room, and hers in turn communicated with the bathroom used by John. When the children were younger all the doors were left open. Now Pierre’s wife preferred to lock her bedroom door, and the one between Martha and Pierre was also locked. On this day Martha took a bath. Lying quietly in the water she could hear John’s movements in his room. Her body was in a great fever from Pierre’s caresses, but she still desired John. She wanted to make one more attempt to awaken John’s desire, to force him into the open, so she would know whether or not there was any hope of his loving her.

Once bathed, she wrapped herself in a long white kimono, with her long thick black hair hanging loose. Instead of returning to her own room she entered John’s. He was startled by the sight of her. She explained her presence by saying, ‘I am terribly anxious, John, I need your advice. I’m leaving this house soon.’

‘Leaving?’

‘Yes,’ said Martha. ‘It is time I leave. I must learn to become independent. I want to go to Paris.’

‘But you are so needed here.’

‘Needed?’

‘You are my father’s companion,’ he said bitterly.

Could it be that he was jealous? Martha waited breathlessly for him to say more. Then she added, ‘I should be meeting people and trying to get married. I cannot be a burden forever.’

‘Married?’

Then he saw Martha as a woman for the first time. He had always considered her a child. What he saw was a voluptuous body, clearly outlined in the kimono, moist hair, a fevered face, a soft mouth. She waited. The expectancy in her was so intense that her hands fell to her sides, and the kimono opened and revealed her completely naked body.

Then John saw that she wanted him, that she was offering herself, but instead of being stirred, he recoiled. ‘Martha! Oh, Martha!’ he said. ‘What an animal you are, you are truly the daughter of a whore. Yes, in the orphanage everybody said it, that ; you were the daughter of a whore.’

Martha’s blood rushed to her face. ‘And you,’ she said, ‘you are impotent, a monk, you’re like a woman, you’re not a man. Your father is a man.’

And she rushed out of his room.

Now the image of John ceased to torment her. She wanted to efface it from her body and her blood. It was she who waited that night for everyone to fall asleep so she could unlock the door to Pierre’s room, and it was she who came to his bed, silently offering her now cool and abandoned body to him.

Pierre knew that she was free of John, that she was his now, by the way she came into his bed. What joy to feel the soft youthful body sliding against his body. Summer nights he slept naked. Martha had dropped her kimono and was naked too. Immediately his desire sprang up and she felt the hardness of it against her belly.

Her diffuse feelings were now concentrated in only one part of her body. She found herself making gestures she had never learned, found her hand surrounding his penis, found herself gluing her body to his, found her mouth yielding to the many kinds of kisses Pierre could give. She gave herself in a frenzy, and Pierre was aroused to his greatest feats.

Every night was an orgy. Her body became supple and knowing. The tie between them was so strong that it was difficult for them to pretend otherwise during the day. If she looked at him, it was as if he had touched her between the legs. Sometimes in the dark hall they embraced. He pressed her against the wall. At the entrance there was a big dark closet full of coats and snow shoes. No one ever entered there in the summer. Martha hid there and Pierre came in. Lying over the coats, in the small space, enclosed, secret, they abandoned themselves.