Paul Theroux - The Black House

“Let me do it,” she said. She helped him off with his clothes, but slowly, undoing each button. He reached for her dress, but she was quicker: she squirmed and stepped out of it and then knelt over him in a pair of tight lacy pants.

“Listen,” she said.

The bed spoke through the ceiling, and the ceiling itself seemed to tremble with the sound.

“She can hear us,” he said.

“No,” she said, and worked her pants down with her thumbs. In the whiteness of her body he saw a peculiar savagery: she was a huntress clasping a ferret between her legs. She got on all fours and then face down on the floor, on her knees and lifted her yellow buttocks at him. He hugged her from behind and entered her, but she complained and took his erect penis and fixed it at the tightness of her arse. He prodded it into her feeling her roughness squeeze him, and he opened her until he could lie across her back. He sodomized her in pumping strokes while he ran his fingers over her cunt, and it seemed to him as if, straddling her in this way, his mouth at the back of her ear, he was crawling over a dank forest floor.

“I love you,” he said. “Please, God—”

“Don’t stop,” she said, much calmer than he.

He felt an orgasm approach, pinching his ankles and calves, climbing to his thighs and concentrating on that sawing prod that was pushed so deep into her it felt as if it was wearing away.

She acted quickly. She moved from under him and pushed him over, and holding his penis like a truncheon she licked at his inner thigh, rolling her head between his legs and lapping at him. She jerked on him, blinding him with pleasure, and her mouth slipping over him and her tight grip made him feel he was being carried upside-down. She had captured him and carried him into this heat and now his arms lay on the floor and she, the marauder, was dragging him to a destination not far off. He put his hands over his face and groaned, and he felt her draw him to her to feed on. There was no sound from him; he shivered, his shoulders going cold, and now a chill, like a wind starting in the still ‘room breathed fraility on him. Caroline swallowed and ran her arm across her mouth. Munday was going to speak, but he hesitated, and he realized he was listening for the ceiling and the bedsprings. There was nothing, except that so quiet the ceiling was emptied of cracks and even the beam looked powerful.

“I love you,” he said at last.

Caroline went over to the fire and threw some split pieces of wood on the fire. She hit them with the poker and drew light from beneath them. Flames jumped at splinters. But Munday was cold; he put his shirt on as, naked, Caroline built up the fire.

“That first time,” she said, “here, in front of the fire, after we’d finished I sat beside you. You were sleeping. And I was thinking—” She broke off and smiled and shook her head.

“That you loved me,” he said.

“No/’ she said.

“What, then?”

“That I loved myself,” she said. “It was—I can’t describe it—euphoria—the way I feel now. It’s so marvelous. I wonder if other people feel that way, that overwhelming affection for their body after sex. I was so happy I wanted to cry and touch myself. It was real love.” He said, “Narcissism.”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “But not the ugly kind, posturing, preening yourself before other people, making them acknowledge you.”

“Nothing to do with sex, then,” he said.

“Everything,” she said.

“What a selfish vfew of sex.”

“I admit it,” she said. But I can’t help it. Sex can

make you feel so strong you don’t need anyone. After I make love, I think I could go to a desert island or a forest and live for the rest of my life. And this feeling lasts for ages.”

“Then why don’t you go to your forest?”

“God, to be away from here!” she said. She looked at Munday and said, “As soon as I start to go, I want to make love again. Then I look for you.”

“You don’t have to look far.”

“It’s not that easy,” she said.

“We could make it easy,” he said. He reached for her hand. “I want to live with you.”

“You’d hate me,” she said, pulling her hand away. “Never,” he said, and clutched her. She allowed it, but she was staring at the ceiling. He said, “I know what you’re thinking. I could live without her.”

“But we couldn’t,” she said.

He touched at her face, like a blind man reading braille for an answer. Sex had emptied him and made him speedily innocent; there was nothing of desire in his touching—it was curiosity.

She said, “Don’t give her up. I couldn’t love you that way. And you’d despise me.”

“You’re making it impossible,” he said.

“It’s been possible up to now,” she said. “We can go on like this. She matters more than you know.”

“Poor Emma,” he said.

“Don’t pity her.”

“What is it you want me to do?”

“Keep her,” she said. “If you want me, keep her in this house—stay with her, please.”

Munday said, “That’s crueler than leaving her.”

“It is the only way.”

“Is it the village?” he asked. “Are you afraid of them thinking you drove her away?”

Caroline said, “You don’t understand.”

“But I do ” said Munday. “Africa prepared me for this.” '

“This isn’t Africa.”

“Villages are my subject,” he said. “I know how they operate. You don’t know and so you’re afraid.” She took her dress from the floor and made a shawl of it for her shoulders, and then she stared at the fire and said, “You know nothing.” The accusation maddened him. He said, “You want to make a fool of her so that you’ll seem innocent.”

“No,” she said.

“That’s why you met me secretly—to hide me, from them!" But he didn’t press the point; he remembered, as he said it, how he had hidden Silvano. “You’ll keep on using her, inhabiting her mind.”

“I care for her,” she said. “Nothing must happen to Emma. You don’t know what they’d do if it got around that Emma left. They’ve already stolen my dogs.”

“But that happened before you knew me.”

“Yes, how did you know? It doesn’t matter—don’t tell me. They’ve hated me for a long time. They drove me out of this house. They have no mercy.”

“I can handle them.”

“They wouldn’t leave you alone,” she said. “Look what they did with your dagger. That was deliberate. There’d be more of that.”

“I’m willing to risk it,” he said.

"I'm not,” she said. “But that’s only part of it. If you want me you must keep her.”

“I won’t do that for them—or you,” he said. “Emma is mine. She loves me. And isn’t it strange? It’s because of her love that I could live without her.”

“But don’t you see / couldn’t!” she cried.

He was silent. He closed his eyes.

“And you couldn’t,” she said. “They wouldn’t let you.”

“Where does it end?”

He fell asleep after that, then opened his eyes on a smaller fire and dead candles, and the new order of the room and Caroline’s absence suggested that time had passed. He picked up his clothes and went upstairs in the dark, feeling his way along the hall and listening to the boards creak under his feet as he entered the bedroom. He looked around the room and remembered Caroline’s last muffled reply, “That’s up to Emma.” The curtains were drawn; what he could make out were the shadowy tops of the bed, the wardrobe, the dresser—and the darkness gave them a heavy solidity, as if they were rooted there and yet halfmissing, like tree stumps. From the dresser mirror came a glimmer of silver light, and all around him in the room hung webs and veils of black. He tugged his pajamas from under the pillow and silently put them on, careful not to disturb Emma. But when he slipped into bed he wanted her to wake up and ask him where he had been, what doing—no, he wouldn’t tell; but if she asked a question he had been unable to frame, an answer might occur to him.