Little Birds (5 page)

What the wind seemed to be pushing into the tower room, the Viking knew she could not keep out altogether; for she began to talk.

She spoke as though she were in a confessional, in a dark Catholic confessional, with her eyes lowered, trying not to see the face of the priest, and seeking to be truthful and to remember everything.

"I thought I could find peace here, but since this wind has started it is as though it has stirred everything that I want to forget.

"I was born in one of the most uninteresting of western towns in America. I spent my days reading about foreign countries and was determined to live abroad at all cost. I was in love with my husband even before I met him because I had heard that he lived in China. When he fell in love with me, I expected it, as if it had all been planned beforehand. I was marrying China. I could barely see him as an ordinary man. He was tall, lean, about thirty-five, but he looked older. His life in China had been hard. He was vague about his occupations—he had worked at many things to earn money. He wore glasses and looked like a student. Somehow I was in love with the idea of China, so much that it seemed to me that my husband was no longer a white but an Oriental. I thought he smelled different from other men.

"We soon went to China. When I arrived there I found a lovely, delicate house full of servants. That the women were exceptionally beautiful did not seem strange to me. That is how I had pictured them. They waited on me slavishly, adoringly, I thought. They brushed my hair, taught me to arrange flowers, to sing and write and speak their language.

"We slept in separate rooms but the partitions were like cardboard. The beds were hard, low, with thin mattresses, so that at first I did not sleep well at all.

"My husband would stay a little while with me and then leave me. I began to notice sounds that came from the next room, like the wrestling of bodies. I could hear the rustle of the mats, occasionally a stifled murmur. At first I did not realize what it was. I got up noiselessly and opened the door. I saw then that my husband was lying there with two or three of the servant girls, caressing them. In the semidarkness their bodies were completely entangled. When I came in he chased them away. I wept.

"My husband said to me, 'I have lived so long in China I am used to them. I married you because I fell in love with you, but I cannot enjoy you as I do the other women ... and I can't tell you why.'

"But I pleaded with him to tell me the truth, pleaded and begged him. After a moment he said, 'They are so small sexually, and you are larger...'

"'What will I do now?' I said. Are you going to send me home? I can't live here with you making love to other women in the room next to mine.'

"He tried to console me, comfort me. He even caressed me, but I turned away and fell asleep weeping.

"The next evening, when I was in bed he came over to me and said, smiling, 'If you say you love me, and you don't really want to leave me, then will you let me try something that may help us enjoy each other?'

"I was so desperate and so jealous that I promised I would do anything he asked of me.

"Then my husband undressed himself and I saw that his penis was covered by a contraption made of rubber and covered with small rubber spikes. It made his penis enormous. It frightened me. But I let him take me this way. It hurt at first, although the spikes were made of rubber, but when I saw that he was enjoying it, I let him continue. All my concern now was whether this pleasure would make him faithful to me. He swore to me that it would, that he no longer wanted his Chinese women. But I would lie awake at night listening for the sounds in his room.

"Once or twice I am sure I heard them, but I did not have the courage to make certain. I became obsessed with the idea that my sex was growing larger and that I would give him less pleasure. Finally I reached such a state of anxiety that I grew ill, began to lose my beauty. I decided to run away from him. I went to Shanghai and stayed in a hotel. I had wired my parents for money so I could sail for home.

"At the hotel I met an American writer, a tall man, heavy, tremendously dynamic, who treated me as if I were a man, a companion. We went out together. He slapped my back when he was happy. We drank and explored Shanghai.

"Once he got drunk in my room and we began to wrestle together like two men. He spared me no tricks. We lay in all kinds of poses, twisting each other around. He got me on the floor with my legs around his neck, then on the bed with my head thrown back touching the floor. I thought my back would break. I loved his strength and weight. I could smell his body as we pressed against each other. We panted. I struck my head against the leg of a chair. We wrestled for such a long time.

"When I was with my husband I had been made to feel ashamed of my height, strength. This man called it all out and enjoyed it. I felt free. He said, 'You are like a tigress. I love that.'

"When we ended our wrestling we were both exhausted. We fell on the bed. My slacks were torn, the belt was broken. My shirt was hanging out. We laughed together. He took another drink. I lay back panting. Then he buried his head under my shirt and began kissing my belly and pulling down my slacks.

"Suddenly the telephone rang and made me jump. Who could that be? I knew no one in Shanghai. I took the receiver; it was my husband's voice. Somehow he had found out where I was. He was talking, talking. Meanwhile my friend had recovered from the surprise of the telephone call and was continuing his caresses. I felt such pleasure talking with my husband and listening to his pleadings to return home ... and all this while my drunken friend took every liberty with me, having succeeded in pulling down my slacks, biting me between the legs, taking advantage of my position on the bed, kissing me, fondling my breasts. The pleasure was so acute that I delayed the conversation. I discussed everything with my husband. He was promising to send away the servant girls, he wanted to come to the hotel.

"I remembered all he had done to me, in the room next to mine, his callousness in deceiving me. I was taken with a diabolical impulse. I said to my husband, 'Don't try to come and see me. I am living with somebody else. In fact he is lying here and caressing me while I talk to you.'

"I heard my husband curse me in the foulest words he could muster. I was happy. I hung up the receiver and sank under the big body of my new friend.

"I began traveling with him..."

The sirocco had again blown the door open, and the woman went to close it. The wind was dying now, and this was the last of its violence. The woman sat down. I thought that she would go on. I was curious about her young companion. But she remained silent. After a while I left. The next day when we met at the post office she did not even seem to recognize me.

The painter Novalis was newly married to María, a Spanish woman with whom he had fallen in love because she resembled the painting he most loved, the
Maja Desnuda
, by Goya.

They went to live in Rome. María clapped her hands in childish joy when she saw the bedroom, admiring the sumptuous Venetian furniture with its wonderful inlaid pearl and ebony.

That first night María, lying on the monumental bed made for the wife of a doge, trembled with delight, stretching her limbs before she hid them under the fine sheets. The pink toes of her plump little feet moved as if they were calling Novalis.

But not once had she shown herself completely nude to her husband. First of all she was Spanish, then Catholic, then thoroughly bourgeois. Before lovemaking the light had to be put out.

Standing beside the bed, Novalis looked at her with his brows contracted, dominated by a desire that he hesitated to express; he wanted to see her, to admire her. He did not fully know her yet despite those nights in the hotel when they
could hear strange voices on the other side of the thin walls. What he asked was not the caprice of a lover, but the desire of a painter, of an artist. His eyes were hungry for her beauty.

María resisted, blushing, a trifle angry, her deepest prejudices offended.

"Don't be foolish, Novalis, dearest," she said. "Come to bed."

But he persisted. She must overcome her bourgeois scruples, he said. Art scoffed at such modesty, human beauty was meant to be shown in all its majesty and not to be kept hidden, despised.

His hands, restrained by the fear of hurting her, gently pulled her weak arms, which were crossed on her breast.

She laughed. "You silly thing. You're tickling me. You're hurting me."

But little by little, her feminine pride nattered by this worship of her body, she gave in to him, allowed herself to be treated like a child, with soft remonstrances, as if she were undergoing a pleasant torture.

Her body, freed from veils, shone with the whiteness of pearl. María closed her eyes as if she wanted to flee from the shame of her nakedness. On the smooth sheet, her graceful form intoxicated the eyes of the artist.

"You are Goya's fascinating little maja," he said.

In the weeks that followed she would neither pose for him nor allow him to use models. She would appear unexpectedly in his studio and chat with him while he painted. One afternoon when she came suddenly into the studio she saw on the model's platform a naked woman lying in some furs, showing the curves of her ivory back.

Later María made a scene. Novalis begged her to pose for him; she capitulated. Tired out by the heat, she fell asleep. He worked for three hours without a pause.

With frank immodesty, she admired herself in the canvas just as she did in the great mirror in the bedroom. Dazzled by the beauty of her own body, she momentarily lost her self-consciousness. Also, Novalis had painted a different face on her body so that no one would recognize her.

But afterwards, María fell again into her old habits of thinking, refused to pose. She made a scene each time Novalis engaged a model, watching and listening behind doors and quarreling constantly.

She became quite ill with anxiety and morbid fears and developed insomnia. The doctor gave her pills which sent her off into a deep sleep.

Novalis noticed that when she took these pills she did not hear him get up, move about, or even spill objects in the room. One morning he awakened early, with the intention of working, and watched her sleep, so deeply that she rarely stirred at all. A strange idea occurred to him.

He drew back the sheets that covered her, and slowly began to lift up her silk nightgown. He was able to raise it above her breasts without her giving any sign of awakening. Now her whole body lay exposed and he could contemplate it as long as he wanted. Her arms were flung outwards; her breasts lay under his eyes like an offering. He was roused with desire for her but still did not dare touch her. Instead he brought his drawing paper and pencils, sat at her side and sketched her. As he worked, he had the feeling that he was caressing each perfect line in her body.

He was able to continue for two hours. When he observed the effect of the sleeping pills beginning to wear off, he pulled down the nightgown, covered her with the sheet and left the room.

Later, María was surprised to notice a new enthusiasm for work in her husband. He locked himself in his studio for whole days, painting from the pencil sketches he made in the mornings.

In this way he completed several paintings of her, always reclining, always asleep, as she had been the first day she posed. María was amazed by this obsession. She thought it was merely a repetition of the first pose. He always altered the face. Since her actual expression was forbidding and severe, no one who saw these paintings ever imagined that the voluptuous body was that of María.

Novalis no longer desired his wife when she was awake, with her puritanical expression and stern eyes. He desired her when she was asleep, abandoned, rich and soft.

He painted her without respite. When he was alone with a new painting in his studio he lay on the couch in front of it, and then a warmth ran through his whole body, as his eyes rested on the maja's breasts, on the valley of her belly, on the hair between her legs. He began to feel an erection stirring. He was surprised at the violent effect of the painting.

One morning he stood in front of María as she lay sleeping. He had succeeded in parting her legs slightly, so as to see the line between them. Watching her unconstrained pose, her opened legs, he fingered his sex with the illusion that she was doing it. How often he had led her hand to his penis, trying to obtain this caress from her, but she was always repulsed and moved her hand away. Now he enclosed his penis fully in his own strong hand.

María soon realized that she had lost his love. She did not know how to win it back. She became aware that he was in love with her body only as he painted it.

She went to the country to stay with friends for a week. But after a few days she fell ill and returned home to see her doctor. When she arrived at the house it looked uninhabited. She tiptoed to Novalis's studio. There was no sound. Then she began to imagine that he was making love to a woman. She approached the door. Slowly and noiselessly, like a thief, she opened it. And this is what she saw: on the floor of the studio, a painting of herself; and lying over it, rubbing himself against it, her husband, naked, with his hair wild, as she had never seen him, his penis erect.

He moved against the painting lasciviously, kissing it, fondling it between the legs. He lay against it as he never had against her. He seemed driven into a frenzy, and all around him were the other paintings of her, nude, voluptuous, beautiful. He threw a passionate glance at them and continued his imaginary embrace. It was an orgy with her he was having, with a wife he had not known in reality. At the sight of this, María's own controlled sensuality flared up, free for the first time. When she took off her clothes, she revealed a María new to him, a María illumined with passion, abandoned as in the paintings, offering her body shamelessly, without hesitation to all his embraces, striving to efface the paintings from his emotions, to surpass them.