Elfriede Jelinek - Lust

The pallid bags of her breasts sag on her ribcage. Only one man and one child have ever made use of them. The Man back home ever bakes his impetuous daily bread anew. If your breasts hang right down on the table at dinner you can get an operation. They were made for the child and for the Man and for the child in the Man. Their owner is still writhing in her excreted fluid. Her bones and hinges are rattling with cold. Michael, racing down the slope, chomps at her privates and clutches and tugs at her dugs. Any moment now his God-given sap will rise in his stem, his cup will overflow. Hurry up, stuff that prick in its designated slot, no loitering. You can hear her shrieks, you can see the whites of her eyes, what are you waiting for?

The young man is suddenly alarmed at the totality with which he can spend himself without being spent. Again and again he reappears from within the woman, only to bury his little bird in the box again. He's now licked Gerti from top to toe. His tongue's still tart with the taste of her piss. Next her face. The woman snaps at him and bites. It hurts, but it's a language animals understand. He grabs her head, still by the hair, pulls it up off the floor and slams it back where he first found it. Gerti splays her mouth wide open and Michael's penis gives it a thorough go. Her eyes are shut. He jabs his knees in, forcing the woman to spread her thighs again. The novelty of this has worn off, unfortunately, since he did it the same way last time. So there you are, all skin and flick, and your desire is always the same old film! An endless chain of repetitions, less appealing every time because the electronic media and melodies have accustomed us to having something new home-delivered every day. Michael spreads Gerti wide as if he wanted to nail her to a cross and were not presently going to hang her in the wardrobe with the other clothes he rarely wears, which is what he'd actually intended. He stares at her cleft. This is familiar territory now. When she looks away, because she cannot bear his scrutiny and the groping, pinching hands that examine her, he hits her. He wants to see and do everything. He has a right to. There are details you can't see, and, in the event of there being a next time, a flashlight would come in handy. Before going in out of the night to the bodywork repairs shop. This woman had best learn to take the lordandmaster's examination of her sex. And not hang her feelings on his peg. For thereby hangs a tale.

Hay cascades over her, warming her slightly. The master is finished. The woman's wound is throbbing and swollen. Retracting his instrument abruptly, Michael signals that he wants to retire to the tidy quarters of his own body. Already he has become a platform for this woman, from which she will speak on the subject of her longing and his long thing. Thus, without so much as being photographed in undewear and framed, one can become the centre-piece of a well-appointed room. This young man created the white and awe-inspiring mountains of flesh before him. Like the evening sun, he has touched that face with red. He has taken a lease on the woman, and as far as she's concerned he can now grope under her dress whenever he likes.

Gerti covers Michael with soft and downy kisses. Soon she will return to her house and her lordandmaster, who has qualities of his own. For we always wish to return to the place of our old wounds and tear open the gift wrapping in which we have disguised the old as the new, to conceal it. And our declining star teaches us nothing at all.

THE WOMAN WHO RAN away is now returning, driven in a stranger's car, to her domestic bliss. To pick up her role in the home movie. As an eyecatching housewife. A drool of saliva slobbering off her chin is the first thing to catch her husband's eye. Now the young man is worried about her, having taken a brief look into her furthest distance and pressed his damp hands to her face. Now isn't the time, true, to lie out in the sun and show off one's body. Suddenly it's snowing again. Has the Direktor phoned the insurance, so that the woman can simply have him replaced with a younger model? In the old days he often came home straight from the brothel, where he'd had a hard time being idle. Washed/cut and laid. In the town whorehouse he used to pole his punt with impunity, but those days are over. Now he has to amuse his own wife, solo, with only his claws, two testicles, and an anus – for it is with such props that domestic entertainment is staged, when the child is unconscious. On reflection, he's a ponderous individual, even when he casts the image of his new tie in the mirror. He slams into his employees loud as a shout, and they play dumb, hoping it won't be me, not me, not me.

The house has already retired for the night by the time we get there. In one room only a worried light is still burning, for the precious child. Throwing up his surfeit of lessons all over his bed. In the boy's room, the Direktor ventures to get all his anger off his chest. This isn't his territory. He doesn't like hearing the water gush to fill the flush. He practically exploded when he found the empty bottles of cheap white wine yet again. Why can't she drink mineral water and be a loving mother for the child? He has forbidden her to drink, but she goes on zonking back the plonk. Has the cow been spreading her hind quarters for some other bull? He bows his lips above the child, so softly that he cannot get a word out. The child is asleep now. Without doing a thing, the boy provides an explanation of why the Direktor is alive. There he rests, mouth open, in the chest of his room. A room of their own is more than poor kids round here have ever even seen when they've been ill. Where is the child in this country who has a room his body will fit into? And where he can look at teddy bears and pictures of sport and pop stars? Because of the sexual ruckus of his parents, this boy has been transferred to a quiet spot. He's a dab hand, though, when it comes to keyholes. And good at ructions of his own, too, when he's beaten for wetting his pants. How he can howl.

It seems he has second sight, their son. Often he will materialize out of gloomy corners; his parents know no reticence in their bodily functions, they still believe in hard work! The Christian society that married them blessed their indulgence in that pleasure. Father has official permission to enjoy Mother ad infinitum, to raggle-taggle her rags and togs till her fear of revealing her secrets has been altogether overcome.

Those who are far away from us are lying abed, touch wood, that they may be well rested come daybreak. Too tired to be summoned by a dread God to the summit of time, to their loved ones, who die too soon. Tomorrow they will hurriedly bolt their breakfast and set off by bus to perform their paltry works; and the least of their works, the children, are sitting there beside them, because they have to go to school. The Direktor of the paper mill strides up to the extra biggest of big choir stalls. Those of his workforce who are awaiting the company pension keep politely to the rear. It's little short of a miracle that these people aren't mere animals, though they do live like animals, as their boss observes to his wife. Their pallid flaccid wives do not inspire them, so what we lordsandmasters call the breath of life is not in them, too bad. Whoever would think that after holy mass the Direktor pulls down his wife's panties and inserts first one and then a second finger to check if the waters are rising, how high they are now, up to her neck yet? I wonder what is going on down below in other women. Whatever it is, perhaps it would fancy a spell on the surface to cuddle and canoodle.

Now all of us in this Roman Catholic country will go down on our knees for a while so that all can see us washing the blood of innocence off our hands, the blood that God, making a superhuman effort, has transformed into himself: man and woman, right, that was his work, his doing. In readers' letters to the paper they are true to themselves and each other, because they are true to the spirit of Christian architecture, forever striving heavenward. There is nothing to be said against the Pope. Who belongs to the Virgin Mary. How else would he know how modest and yet greedy for souls this woman is? For instance, the woman can pout her lips like a funnel to receive the Direktor's member when she is kneeling. Now don't you go pretending you've never seen it on your secret home movie screen! Just like yourself, supposedly Jesus, that perpetual travelling representative in Austria and related territories, went here and there to see if there was any need to improve or punish or affect. And in the course of his travels he met you. Whom he loves as he loves himself. And what of you? Do you only love the money that belongs to others? Right. So write a letter to the paper, sounding off at those who have no God, or, if they did have one, wouldn't know what to do with him.