Elfriede Jelinek - Lust

Like beasts of prey they slink along their blossoming lanes, casting down ramblers and rocks. With their mighty packs of genitals these men are out searching for a bosom where they can lay their heads for good. The herd is still docile as yet. Their meat's still sealed in cellophane, clearly visible, but soon, when the sun touches and turns it, it'll bloat and grow and juice will come from the tiny slit. And then the sun will be beating down, the moist deposit will burst, the acrid smell of sex will whiff across the parking lots, and eyes will be yoked together two by two till the cart lands in the ditch and wishes go wandering off without their master, looking for another animal to pull along. Men shall not have lived in vain. If they wish it, women will piss in their faces. They lie still under the tree of sex, the planting of which they superintended themselves, and now they in turn are watered by the tree. If it'll get her a new brooch, Gerti will do that at home too, if a fist is thumped into her manured bed till her earth opens up and she relaxes her sphincter. Pleasures such as this are available to each and every one of us. We don't need to hide away in our closets of wretchedness, hemmed in by furniture and nothing but. People looking higher and higher so that they won't have to lower their standard of living.

Time wears away lust, the desire to penetrate each other and emit penetrating cries. What counts is to deposit a still ampler body alongside our own dump one of these mornings. But the weary ones, they gobble each other up, down to the fingernails. They have a better time of it, not having to be slim or to bleach their hair, they're pale enough from the machine to which they must return and which they must keep clean. And if they look about them they see waste fluid from the water supply building site polluting the stream. And everything they've done, all they have created, has to be shut down and dried out and held to their breast. And all the Direktor of this state-padded and foreign-exploited plant wants is to squirt off into his personal plague, his wife. In the interval from evening to morning she becomes a threat to him. How can he enter by the rear when he's been shown the door? Will Hubert the huntsman (or Hermann the cuntsman) ever be able to fall asleep in the acrid fox-hole where he's been caught at it? Who, if not he, would kneel before his wife, senses pricked, laying aside her folds one by one? Above, she puts a good face on things, while below he buries a bad face in things, hissing promises with his forked tongue. There is air all around the field, and women are about us constantly. We eat of them, we eat with them. No fear that this trafficking intercourse might disturb the neighbour: he's busy regulating his own stop-go flow.

The Direktor keeps a tight hold of his car and pisses. The headlamps beam upon his person. He can pump his meat extract into the woman just as often as she bends down from her lofty peak. This couple can park anywhere in his spacious house to take their lawful pleasure of each other. The woman is off to have her hair done. Beyond the mountains the sky is brightening, the pastures are being clad in day, which shows everything up better. Only this woman is lying her way into cracks in the wall, which time has forced there for her. We are one and all of us vain, ladies. Let your dresses blow in the wind and your teeth in your mouth, and fall upon your partner as if he had done you no harm for hours! Mind your language!

It is a never-ending dream for the couples. They go to work and raise their eyes from the path they know in order to look at another person they know too. And there they stand, next to each other, and one of them just has to buy that reduced tracksuit, to devalue it entirely. The path fades and withers below their feet. Their wives are all gaping wounds where they have been touched, but nowadays none of them will take sick leave lightly. Otherwise the company where we have a place of work for life and a partner for love will frown. How does the picture get there once we've punched the button? No idea, but you'd best switch off if there's a storm and retrieve your own image from the terrible slot where no one would insert even a single schilling to look at it. And yet you are alive. And oftener than you really deserve you live off the affection of a woman who has to gum and glue you together. Purely because she's hoping for a little love.

Gathered beneath the clouds, they go in at the gateway and disappear. Just made it; and in the factory they'll meet the maker. Now go home to your wife and rest, while the rubber smokes at the breakers' yards and soldering irons sweat. The metal groans, and steel entrails spill out of the cars that once enjoyed greater love than the wives whose jobs on the side paid for them. Just one more thing: don't be guided by your own taste, because you need only blink and there'll be a new model on the market, waiting for you, nobody but you! Just imagine! You'd already own one, having inveigled it with words and savings accounts long since. And that'd be it. Nothing doing. Off home with you. Got it?

Completely remodelled for her suitor, the woman, topped by her hairdo, reaches the shore of the small town. She presses only her handbag tightly to her. She has left her fateful son in school. Policemen, promptly blushing at the sight of her, have very nearly been escorting her across the street. She totters. But she does not sink: an expert swimmer, beneath whom all evil is borne away on the current. In her claws, the mink coat, the woman paddles about in the work of the other paper tigers above whom two-thousand-metre peaks tower menacingly. They are the people who have torn cellulose and paper from the grip of this tough, toothless landscape. The woman's clothes: a sempstress ought to be able to run up a simple copy of them any time. Heavens the things she's wearing! Hacked small, the wood is stacked up around the factories and sawmills. Why is the Frau Direktor wearing stiletto heels at a time when frozen water is everywhere keeping a firm grip on the ground and on us too? We don't dare walk if the traffic light doesn't want us to. What nonsensical clothes the woman is wearing! She gets behind the wheel and tosses back a nip. She sprays something anti-herself on her teeth. Her loaned lover won't fall in the snow, he's so accomplished, a real work of art. Youth is its own reward, even if one breaks a leg. Youth laughs at its own stamina as it lunges cheekily out, clad in a fashionable coat resistant as yet to the assault of the years. Let us grant them a jolly day out on the waves of sport, rich and poor alike: all of them frequently have to drive a long way to enjoy it. To enjoy the virgin snow and a bit of excitement. The rich, mind you, want to get closer to the source of the elements (and plonk arse-down in the purity of the virgin product). It powders away, dazzling. It is as if they were earthborn. But the others strain at their leads at the factory and at their loved ones back home, and they too rejoice in the snow.

The Frau Direktor gets behind the wheel, having outdone herself. The mouths of the town mould into smiles at the windows of cafes on seeing her. She's merry. See, she pulled a bottle out of her fur! Her mouth smiles in the cold. The great and small behind the panes bow as if they thought to plunge into her heart. Young women with children and dresses hanging upon them just have to choose this moment to go shopping. They want to see something. They want to be something. Like this woman". They'd know what to do with it, that's for sure! A debacle in broad daylight at the hairdresser's, like our skiers at the Olympics: to tear the gadgets out of our hair, the gadgets we women are wrapped up with. They've never dared. To gaze without fear at one's own image. Hair, at any rate, really can be changed without any difficulty, if we don't like ourselves any more, ladies.