Elfriede Jelinek - Lust

The woman writes characters in the air with her hand. She does not have to earn her living, she is kept by her husband. When he returns home at the end of the day he has earned the right to set his signature to life. That child was no accident. The boy is his! Now he no longer sees death ahead.

With pent-up love she seeks out her son in the troupe of children. He bawls and bawls and still he doesn't tire. Was he like that when he crept from her ground floor, the womb of Mother Earth? Or, as his heavenly father would put it, was he first led astray, were the arts of life at work on him, carving him into something he was not, that no boy at this age ever was or ever shall be? The child claims rights of those who think differently, rights as inclusive as the treaties signed by nations. He parrots his father's expressions: you have to grow a little every day! Great! An erection! Men are always a little ahead of themselves so that they can look at themselves whenever they want. And the child, made of a being that has long since, like clinker, fallen down behind him (the bell foundry of his mother), will presently, in a year or so, squirt high as heaven where little ones are welcomed in to have a snack.

The boy goes racing through the midst of comrades and cameras as if through open and welcoming doors.

The cold has stolen into the woman's feet. The soles of her slippers are not worth mentioning, but she herself doesn't say much anyway. The soles barely protect her mortal soul from the ice of the world. She stomps on. Better look out. Slide, don't let the others shove you. But people are forever shoving. What else should it mean when the golden-headed sexes, after a fashion, open up In front of the furniture, sole intimates and witnesses of their talents? What if they were to be slung derisively off the summits of their wishes? The woman is holding onto the railing and making good headway. Foodstuffs are being lugged homeward all around, for meals are the main thing in family life. Rolled oats spray from the women's mouths, I'd say they were worried what the expensive ingredients might get up to in the pan. And the men are there, at their plates, filled with a sense of event. The unemployed, who have deviated from the kind of life intended by God and blessed in the sacrament of matrimony, can just about afford to live, but the good life isn't on the cards: no adventure playground, no casino, no cinema watching a lovely film, no cafe with a lovely woman. The only thing that comes free is the use of their own families. The boundary lines are drawn by sex. Which Nature surely can't have planned, at least not like this. Nature shares the good life with us so that we can eat of her produce and be eaten in turn by the owners of factories and banks. Interest would have the shirt off our back. But no one can say what water does. It's plain to see what is done to the water, though, with the cellulose plant pumping its waste into the stream, which is in no hurry to get anywhere. Let it pump its poison somewhere else, where people like their streams to supply dead fish to eat. The women examine the shopping bags which they used to get rid of the dole money. Consumers are well advised in the stores, where special offers are announced over the public address. Special offers are what they themselves were, once! And their men were chosen according to their means. But now they are treated as the meanest of creatures at the labour exchange. Sitting at the kitchen table, drinking beer and playing cards, a dog's life. But not even a dog would be so patient, kept on its lead outside the wonderful stores filled with fine wares that mock us.

Nothing is ever lost. The state is at work with what we don't see. Where does our money go, once we have finally got rid of it? We burn to be done with it, the notes are hot in our hands, the coins melt in our fists. Yes, we must part. Time shall stand still on payday so that we can stop and take a good look at our stinking and steaming heap of money, still warm from our labours, before we transfer it to our accounts. One day we'll be in clover. What we'd like best of all would be to lie back and rest amid our hot golden nuggets of dung. But love, ever restless, is already looking around to see where there's something better than what we've already got. The people who live where skiing originated, people who once grew here like grass (the world's most famous skiing museum is at Murzzuschlag, Styria!) are familiar with it only by sight. They are stooped so far forward over the cold ground that they cannot find the trail. Continually others are passing them, to do their business in the woods.

Like a horse the woman tugs at her reins. Embarrassed, In their Sunday best, the strangers brought together by an ad in the personal column used to sit on her sofa, mostly two by two. Dejected, the woman giggled, toying with the glasses on the coasters, and the men, the members of the club, were out coasting, their members wanting new toys. Unbuttoned, unbraced. Wanting to change to a new feed bag once every so often. Standing poised at the living room table, slinging the women's legs to left and right about their shoulders. When you're on your travels it's nice to leave your old familiar ways behind; and then, when you return home, how com-forting it is to go back to those old ways. At home the bed is a four-square thing on solid ground. The women, who go to the hairdresser every week, are properly put through their paces, because that's what they thrive on. Well-upholstered bodies, well-upholstered suites, an orgy of fleshy padding, as if we'd won an unlimited suplly of experience in a lottery. Intimate lingerie is sold, so that experience – the kind of experience we women hopefully and vainly long for – will look different when it comes to call and we are asleep and turn over and store it up.

My the pricking of his flesh, and the liberties taken by the press, the Direktor is unceasingly goaded onward. He takes liberties himself, e.g. he pees on his wife as dogs do. Having first made a little mountain of her person and clothes so that it's downhill all the way. The scale of desire is open-ended, what Richter would presume to judge? The Man uses and dirties the woman as if she were the paper he manufactures. He is responsible for the well-being or otherwise of this household, greedily he yanks his tail out of the bag before he has even shut the door and stuffs it, still warm from the butcher's, into the woman's mouth, setting her teeth on edge. Even if they have company for dinner, bearing their light into his darkest recesses, he still manages to whisper sweet nothings about her genitals in his wife's ear. Uncouthly his mitt gropes her under the table, burrowing into her furrow, taking her fear, which strains at the lead, for a walk in front of his business associates. The woman has to be kept on a short leash so that she knows what's what. She has to be ever mindful of the pungent solution he could steep her in. Man and wife must cleave together, so he laughs and reaches into her cleavage before their guests. Which one among you has no need of paper? A satisfied customer is king. And which of you has no sense of humour?

The woman goes on. For a while a big strange dog joins her, hoping to be able to bite her foot, since she isn't wearing proper shoes. The Alpine Association has issued its warning: there's death in the mountains. The woman kicks the dog. She doesn't want anyone or anything expecting anything of her. The lights will soon be switched on in the houses, and every hearth will then be a place of truth and warmth, and the hammering and chiselling will be starting up inside the women.

The valley is peopled with the wishes of part-time farmers. The children of God. Not of the personnel manager. The valley shoves up closer, like an excavator digging up the woman's footsteps. She walks by the immortal souls of the unemployed, whose number increaseth year by year as the Pope commanded. Youngsters flee their fathers and are chased by curses sharp as axes through the empty sheds and barns. The factory kisses the good earth from which it has taken the all too acquisitive people. We have to find ways of rationalizing our approach to the federal forests and federal funds. Paper is always needed. Now look: without a map, we would be headed straight for the abyss. Somewhat embarrassed, the woman thrusts her hands in the pockets of her dressing-gown. Her husband does take an interest in the unemployed, believe me: even if they are not kept busy, the thought of them keeps him busy, he never stops, never a moment's rest.