Patrick White - The Vivisector

He hadn’t tasted more than the small rubbery nipples, when she cried out: ‘You are hurting me! We are animals!’

‘Yes, Hero. Come in here.’

He hadn’t intended to take her into that one, but nothing develops as conceived: the pure soul, for example; the innocent child, already deformed, or putrefying, in the womb.

They got their clothes off in the back room he hadn’t intended. The cold mattress-ticking rustled through their swollen veins; the leather asterisks stamped themselves on their half-melted skins.

At moments they were laughing together over something and he wondered whether he knew what it was. Certainly their love-making sounded pneumatic at times; their lust took on grotesque shapes. Yes, love had its puddingy moments. LOVE: that was what they were laughing at; but immediately stopped shocked short grinding their teeth into each other’s teeth. The portcullis wouldn’t allow them asylum. They looked into each other’s eyes and there were no depths to reach: there were the positions of love.

After demanding the ultimate in depravity, she ran out flat-footed looking for the bathroom, nor did he direct or advise her, because she would arrive at that too by instinct: the bath with the brown stain on the bottom; the French-smelling lavatory bowl; the droppings of verdigris under the geyser; her daemon would cope with all of it. Holding his arm over his eyes, a hand over his dribbled crutch, he waited for her return.

They might have lain all their lives sleeping side by side on the thawed mattress-ticking.

When he woke he noticed that his own body, although more muscular, looked more defenceless than hers because whiter, nakeder: in fact, flesh. You forget about vaccination marks. Here were his, their white, sweating scars waiting to drop off in the end as the scabs had in the beginning; whereas hers were baked into a terra-cotta arm they might dig up a thousand years hence and produce as evidence of ‘civilization’.

She turned over, and her breasts were two extinct volcanoes he wouldn’t approach; they could erupt all over again: himself drowning in lava.

This was where he said: ‘If you’re hungry I can open a tin of herrings.’

They lay a long time barely fondling the parts they had appropriated from each other.

Somewhere in the late afternoon, judging by the resentment with which the inhabitants of Chubb’s Lane were throwing the crockery around in their sinks, she sat up yawning her mouth off, stretching her arms to release, but in fact knotting them. Then she stomped over the boards, on squelching feet, her naked body forced by a recall of prudery into constricting angles, and started floundering about through her handbag. The bag, which he hadn’t noticed, sounded an old shapeless valise stuffed with superfluous necessities, the search a sordid one, at least for anybody as perfectly achieved as Hero Pavloussi. In the end she came across the cigarettes.

Scratching an armpit, he said: ‘You’re quite a bit different from what I expected.’ He continued scratching voluptuously to celebrate his relief; prolonged perfection would have made intolerable demands.

‘I was no different from what I am.’ On lighting a cigarette, she came clumping back to the bed, for modesty’s sake more than ever in the shape of a half-open jack-knife. ‘It is you who want always to create something — even people. Because you see them mostly at their worst, you have wanted somebody at her best.’ Seated again on the bed, strengthened by a comfortable attitude, she was able to behave most objectively. She gathered him into her hand. She was examining him as though these wilted flowers, or bruised fruits, or catch of squid, had never known her creative touch; they were her specimens.

‘Cosmas my husband’—she sat frowning at the penis in her hand—‘is one of these men who must build a monument. I am to represent perfection for him. In the first place, I am of a class he never had access to, except through his money. Of course I married him for his money. My mind told me: However else could you marry such an unpolished man, except for the advantages; so don’t deceive yourself. At least I could be honest about it. But however crude my motive for marrying a millionaire, it was not as crude as what I discover as the real reason. I find I marry Pavloussis for his body. I am soon distracted by this in many ways gross peasant, and he is shocked to find that his monument will become a monument to lust. Because where he is not sensual and lustful with paid women, Cosmas is pure pure. He is soon quite impotent from disappointment in his wife. I remember him telling me: “Not even a prostitute would behave like this. It would offend against her conventions.” I said: “But you are my husband, whom I married for his money, and now I find you give me joy. Am I not to express this?” It was even more shocking for him that I try to rationalize my behaviour. He could understand and accept my marrying him for his money, but not the other. About this time he cancelled a visit to his island — to his mother — because I believed he could not dare to produce his wife.’

‘How did he dare dispose of his “daughter”, and drown the bagful of cats?’

‘That is not to the point!’ She rejected her lover with a force-fulness that made him whinge.

Anger drove her into a less comfortable position. She sat on the edge of the bed, rounding her shoulders to shut him out, with stiffened fingers manipulating her cigarette. She was making a business of smoking; but it did not ease her feelings, as her mouth showed whenever the glow gave it away.

‘Very much to the point,’ he persisted, ‘if you talk about rationalizing behaviour.’

Her silence sounded a sulky one.

‘Or are Greeks perhaps cruel by nature?’ he couldn’t help suggesting.

‘ Who is cruel? Greeks? Turks? Man is cruel!’ she shouted back. ‘God — God is cruel! We are his bagful of cats, aren’t we? When God is no longer cruel many questions will be answered.’

She was so furious she accompanied her accusations by striking the mattress with her stiffened hand.

‘You drive me to blaspheme!’ she shouted louder still.

‘But you’ve told me you’re not a believer.’

‘No. I do not believe. But blaspheme every day!’

She burst into such a torrent of grief it was now his turn to be shocked. He tried to comfort her by caressing her racked body; but this was not what she wanted: she shook him off in a flurry of wet hair.

‘What I do believe in,’ she cried, ‘is my husband’s goodness, because I have experienced it. You will not believe in it because of the bagful of cats. He loved the cats — which he killed. Yes, he killed them. Why do we kill what we love? Perhaps it is because it becomes too much for us — simply for that reason.’

‘You could have saved the cats.’

She grew quiet at once.

‘Why — yes — I could have saved the cats by giving an order after he had left. But I am myself also condemned, as I sit waiting in the house, and the drowning do not care about the other drowning.’ She reached out. ‘Do you see?’ She laughed hoarsely as she dragged him down with her into her watery inferno.

Their indecently resigned struggles inside the bag must have been observed and judged from a distance by the shaggy god from under his black, heavy eyelids.

She said as they were drawn apart at last through the apathetic depths: ‘Will you turn on the light, please, Hurtle? I will be going now.’

He touched the dry mattress-ticking to which he had been returned. What fascinated him still was the texture of the wet bag, or condemned cell, in relation to the matted, elastic bodies of the prisoners.

‘The light?’ she repeated. ‘Were you sleeping — darling?’ she remembered to add.