Elfriede Jelinek - Lust

The Direktor's wife is expected to get in out of the dark, into this car, so that she doesn't catch cold. She is not expected to make a fuss. Nor to carry on the way women like to carry on, when they first serve up dinner to their families and then spoil it for them with their nagging. All day long a man lives off the beautiful image of his wife, only to have her nag all evening. From the private boxes of their battlemented windows, where window boxes of flowers and plants form a spiky defence against the world, they look down at others who draw the bow too tight and relax their own longings out of sheer exhaustion. They put on their party best, cook for three days ahead, leave the house, and throw themselves, as you make your bed so you must lie on it, into the nearest reservoir or river.

The student notices the woman is wearing slippers. Helping others is his job. There she stands on her paper-thin soles. One of the legion of henpeckers who spend their lives eating leftovers spurned by the family. She takes a swig from a pocket edition of a bottle which is held to her lips. She and the village women and all of us, there we stand, dripping and thawing, facing the kitchen stove and counting the tablespoonfuls in which we dole ourselves out. The woman whispers something to the young man, she's picked a right one here, a right wing one at that, who's often fraternized till he was drunk in a heap on the floor. He returns her gaze. At the slightest stir of feeling, her sleepy head is already resting on his shoulder. The car tyres rasp, wanting to be off. An animal stands up, hearing its cue, and the young man too wouldn't be averse to rummaging in this woman's tast-offs for a little small change. For a change. It would be something different, naughty, unexpected. Afterwards you could drape a flimsy cloak of talk about the encounter. His fellows at the fraternity have long sirice bagged their first quarries, and the fleeces, once combed and cared for by loving mothers, are hung about their shoulders. Now at last one's own wishes, straining impatiently at the leash, can be tossed something nourishing to eat, meat cut out of another. So that those wishes grow big and strong. And one day have big fishes in the ocean of the top management floors dancing attendance. Yes, Nature means business. And happily we chain her up, to score against her will if need be. Futile for the elements to roar. We are already in the waves!

ALL AROUND, OPPRESSED people are falling, cascades of water, down steps and ornate porches into the uncertain consciences of their oppressors. Tame-spirited creatures that they are, they don't overshoot the mark. Every morning the boisterous radio bawls that it's time to get up, wakey wakey. And instantly the warmth of love is yanked away from under their feet and their sweat-soaked sheet taken from them. They grope about their wives, they dirty their precious belongings. Time breezes gently by. People have to fulfil their pensum before they can draw a pension. Before they are paid off. And have themselves paid off the things they believed – their whole lives long, with eyes tight shut – they owned. Just because they were tolerated among those things as visitors. While their wives, by using them constantly, coaxed the things into life. Only women are really at home. The men loaf oafishly in the undergrowth at night. Or leap about the dance floor. The paper mill. The mill spews people out, after they've been of use for years. But first they go to the top floor to collect their papers.

The Frau Direktor dwells in their midst. Quiet. White. Not even a good roast will set her up to go on living as it does with you and me. The children are brought to her to learn to rattle and prattle. Till the sustaining sound of music falls silent and the howl of the factory is upraised across the mountaintops. Early in the mornings the fathers sleepily splash their jets into the toilet, while apprentices are more rudely awakened, with music dinned into them the moment their alarms go off. The half-naked bodies grow in front of the mirrors in the newly-tiled bathrooms. The chains gleam. The little cocks crow merrily from the flies, the warm waters are passed. Perhaps this toilet is a mirror image of you. So please leave it in the same condition that you would like to be left in!

A car is parked in front of the Direktor's wife. An animal gazes out from within itself and bounds into the wood, where it has its peace and quiet. True: in summer, the heavily-laden rafts of life float there. People off to unload in Nature. To relieve themselves. The car is warm, suddenly the sky seems much lower down. Time is tending to a close and people get close and grow tender. In the wood, the deer, who have an even worse time of it in winter than we do, stretch. The woman cries, leaning on the dashboard, and fumbles in the glove compartment for a handkerchief to dry her misery. The car starts. Questions are scattered around like gifts. Right away, the woman throws open the door of the car as it's moving off and plunges into the wood. She is full to the brim with her feelings, fit to burst, and she has to give vent to her instincts, like steam escaping through a vent, hiss, boo hiss, boo hoo, boo his, boo whose? That is what the books say; because you value yourself, you can buy one of these cheap books and read all about it. As if she'd run into a swarm of gnats or some other unfamiliar mob, the woman waves her arms about, trips over a root, cuts her face on hard old snow and vanishes into the darker part of the wood. No, there she goes! Stumbling over the twisted black branches. Whereupon she returns of her own free will to the leash and strap, gets into the car, and is bedded down into the leisurely depth of the seat. Within herself she grows. And is at her own service. She can hear her feelings rumbling closer like thunder. Racing like an express through the station of her body. Even the station-master's slender signal baton is almost too much for her. She is obeying her own command. And no one else's. The powerful current that charges these creatures of feeling shocks them like divine intervention. How wonderful are the people with enough time to acquire a pilot's licence for their own rudderless, drifting feelings, so they can fly hither and thither within themselves!

In the midst of her life, this woman often likes to think she has to get out of her alignment alongside other women with sagging breasts and hopes who have docked beside her. Get out and away to a sumptuous land where tears are dried with greater caTe. She is fond of herself to the point of idolatry. A package tourist in the country of circumspect passions. Fixing assignations with herself wherever she chooses. And fleeing herself at the same time, because somewhere else she might enjoy an even more thrilling rendezvous with her inner self. Some-where that you can sit on a cloud and quaff even more deeply from the golden goblets of your own emotion. She is as volatile as a compound that will dissolve at any moment.

Likewise with art and what we feel about it. Everyone feels differently. Most people feel nothing at all. And yet we're agreed on scraping the bottom of our barrel and serving up what we find, only half done, for the others to devour. The flames roar from our little stoves, you'd think we were getting on like a house on fire. Down we go, in all too rapid pursuit of our desires, as if we were on ice. The sun shines, and the rooms where we stew in our lust for life are well heated too. Everything is hot, and the spirit, warmed by licking flames, rises high above us for others to see. Sooner or later we take a tumble because we don't have our feet on the ground any more, we're in love and the demands we make on our partners are groundless. How happy we are to go romping about the mountains, as infinitely various as creation, till we lose our pointed caps.