Elfriede Jelinek - Lust

The boy has got up again, sleepy, he'd best not rattle at the bathroom door like that or he'll be tipped out with the bathwater. The Man forces the woman's head right back to prevent her from yelling. His bird is wide awake, it's locked in the cage of her mouth, which is where it likes to be, flapping about till the woman starts to retch and heave and her vomit travels along his shaft and dribbles down his dangling testicles. Too bad. His glans is yanked out of her pharynx and the woman tipped halfway over the tub. His prick is stiff as a bull-rush, and now he rushes her like a bull and tucks his prick up in bed where it belongs, he tolls the bells of her breasts, alcohol gushes from her like water, and potent drops of the good stuff squirt into her cunt. No, the Direktor won't allow this woman simply to tumble out of his nest. What does she think she's doing, obeying her own senses, not him? Man and wife are one flesh.

The woman only appeared for a minute or so in the arena where consumers learn to swim. Now she is sitting in a filled bath, getting a soaping. The dressing-gown, long since crumpled, will have to be cleaned, trimmed and ironed. The Man tears whole handfuls of hair from her pussy as she goes about her washing and refurbishing. He digs into the gills of her privates and his soapy fingers invade her ground water where he shot his wad. She thrashes and whimpers, it stings! Out front her coveted fruits hang plump on their branches. The Direktor makes an investigative grab at the tips of the sausage skins which someone else has left, he twirls them round three fingers and then slowly releases them. Hard as buttons, the areolas' cold eyes stare at us. You can never do anything right for the lordsandmasters, not even if you were a queen. And already the terrible vessels that must receive the contents of the men are clattering. With a whiffle and sniffle the waiting-room doors swing shut on the boneyards of the unemployed. We shall find a way to tame those floods as well.

THEY MIGHT REST IN PEACE and security. But first the sunshine that peeps through the forks of their limbs would needs cast its piercing light upon them: there is something they can do that it's worth having a body for! They can doff each other's hats. With a few thrusts they work their way through to the other side of each other. Their dwelling place seems a very heaven. And before they (like the cheetah) have taken the few mighty bounds that will take them to the drinking trough of the mighty, they'll have coupled several times over. Like motes of dust in a sunbeam. Why else would they have and hold each other, care for each other with water and showers of emotion, as if they were to be canonized? Every part of their bodies has earned their partner's attention and love. Like the farmers who work on the side and get on the foreman's nerves by forever falling asleep on the job. Laying into the animals, slitting their throats, nodding and winking at blind horses: all the tricks that have been performed on themselves, dozens of times. Here comes the small farmer from the stalls and sheds, in Wellingtons, because his good shoes are at home together with his good wife. The blood of the rabbit the children loved is dripping from the sleeve of his jacket. But even this man, who is on this earth to have a life, has an occasional friendly side when he drags a girl off the dance floor into the bushes. And she scarcely notices what she's putting up her resistance to.

But those who dwell in the light that enters through their blinds experience things altogether differently. They are at their best for each other. Even when they oil the silent ointment of time upon their bodies. You hardly see it, time, that suntan lotion of creation, but those who have anointed themselves with it are safe from the rays and noise. Look at this woman, for instance, in this photograph. Time seems to have passed her by without leaving any trace at all. There she is, in her locker, where her husband has stored her for safe keeping.

The big kids who attend the school of profit are filled with worries about nationalization, which tugs at our purse strings as this Direktor tugs at his wife's dugs. The owners have given him to understand that the big companies, wonderful in their greed as in their wrath, would like to play for mortal stakes with the people of the country. The children of those who lose out are the first to realize what side their bread is buttered: no matter how thin the slice, you need to earn your daily bread and save it up in your bank account. On target for the super premium. And maybe the Direktor will play along and sing a chorus too, hallelujah.

He has other worries, then, which he wears with a ruffled air. He wears his hair parted, unruffled, and his genitals in a bag he's brought for his wife. How her eyes will light up! Wait and see! His high monthly income brings indelible joy and cheer upon his weary but notably solvent head. We servants, though, are known for what we are. For there is life in the depths. The people flock to the pub. Soon we shall have all our sheep safely in from the rain and cold, we'll be feathering our own nest, doing our business. Our rapid growth causes suffering to the nobodies who can't see further than the ends of their noses and yet travel further than that, bare-headed and full of resolve, and still end up in front of the boss. Who says he can't comply with their wishes, and swish! – their wishes are scythed down in swathes by the company's resolution to rationalize (ah, these rational people). Truly, the Direktor is in his element. He takes the measure of others, for he is immeasurably wealthy in the eyes of the people who learn how to fall like autumn leaves beside him. Softly, so that they don't disturb him when he plays the violin. He can see no reason why he should restrain himself inside his belt, which looks good on him, for perhaps another has dwelt inside his wife, where only he should dwell. My thanks for listening to these insults.

Tenderly, every inch the jovial deity he can sometimes be when he's in the mood for his wife, he leans over her skin, which is musky with animal vapour. She wants to sleep now. Not a well-advised wish. She is full of her recent past, and if we get real close we'll notice it too: the future "is wide open to the young, if they have studied and their parents have learned to play them off against one another. Let the neighbours' children rot like fallen fruit where they lie. And this woman is already wide open to a hopeless love, cosy as a rabbit hutch the day after the battle, she has already shlepped in all her furniture and there's flowery wallpaper too! From her pussy only a narrow path leads on, and there he stands, the student, together with all my readers, an educated youngster, mild of temper and tempest, waiting to get in again. If we all keep together and keep everything we've got together, our premonitions may come true. We are unnecessary! If we have any title to live at all, then in the memory of some loved animal we have fed or some loved person we have fed ourselves to.

The Direktor could batter his wife, bat her skull-first into the garden any time he chooses, she'd better watch out if she goes batting her eyelids again. But he doesn't bother just now because his urges are gathering like waters in a woodland spring. Useless tears will make her mascara run, she'll be masked, unrecognizable. Patches of purple will blossom on the moorland of her body. Poverty isn't the only way to beat people into submission when day inflames the early hours and coffee gushes into people's gobs. It is not good if we women have nothing to love but the cleaning of rooms and are not subjected to daily inspection to see if our organs are all in order. Don't worry. We're all just as we were. Just the same. Soon the abyss will be full of us. Our detached houses will be o'ershadowed by the interest on the loan. And the boss will be off to the byre, to us animals on the chains of our wishes, waiting to be kicked about. Anyone with a smallholding and a little house of his own will be the first to taste the bitterness of unemployment: so say the people who have just been shopping at a divine little boutique and then squeeze in behind their desks where no one can soothe them any more. Not even the ever so slight friction of water on the sex brushes they use to paint each other's wishes can make them good to the goods and chattels they keep chattering with fear in the death cell. Often it's a drive of several hours till they're home with their human partners and can switch on the current that zaps through the chairs.