Lust (17 page)

They romp and ruckus on the slopes. The lifts haul their watertight load, sealed in a plastic container, with Nature's invitation dangling, up across the frozen-stiff landscape boarded up with skis. The land seems terrible under the skis, whereas at one time it was manifold or simply folded. Snow machines retch out in front of raucous day trippers from Vienna. Every one of them thinks he's an ace on skis. Perhaps we'll stay here a while longer. Already we've been on this earth for aeons, to change it, and now it is coming to an end beneath us. Skiers only toy with the landscape, don't worry, they're not too wary: they wander upon the face of the earth, with their enormous private parts, and stamp out every fire. City folk go up to the top for sheer love of speed, and sheer speed sends them down to the bottom again. Oh, if only they could get out of themselves again! They would fly about under the sun, honest masters, showing what they have made of themselves and of others. They have commingled with others and brought forth further sporty types. Their children will take skiing lessons with their parents' piggy sutures still before their eyes. Sport,

that painful nothingness — why should you of all people go without it, if you don't have much else to lose? There's no furniture here, but the jump-suits, goodies and splendour plus the absurd and ill-matched headgear will bear all before them, and, if not, just jump over the wee mountain! Behind it there's sure to be another one that will swallow up everything that fits into us. The Alps have long since started feeling the ravages of modishness, murder and mores: in the evenings we all roll about laughing at some clown with a concertina going through his capers for us. All about, the villagers are asleep. For them the mountains do not part when they drive to work in the morning. On their bikes, or belted tight in their tiny cars, they jolt over every bump till at last they open the gate to the employees' enclosure. Some of them make it to the top, true, if they have well-steeled footwear and nerves. Quiet, please. When all's said and done, people are at work here with their animals, each in a separate cage.

And not one stretches out a hand for one of these skiing creatures making craters in the ground to stop them. Not one is exempt from the laws of the earth, which decree that heavy things must go down, they can test it for themselves. Some of them are wearing sunglasses. They look at each other. They think of gobbling each other up. Sex is planned for the evening a la nouvelle cuisine: not much, but choice. Redly the weather steams in its basin, our forks clink, the golden heads bow down, the mountains are motionless. Thousands of offensive persons come flinging down the slopes. And a few hundred superfluous persons are busy making paper, a commodity that is devalued even faster than people are worn out by sport. Still want to read on? And breed on? No? See.

The woman ventures into town, where her husband used to park his car and inhale hot water at the sauna.

Never mind. She hangs upon his balls and cliffs, aslant his genital stairway, his very own wife, beside whom he is found by Sleep when Sleep goes looking for him. This woman is now his luxury, he pours into her till she overfloweth. The man is there to have a small matter about his person put right, and the women, in order to renovate him, have dressed in the most risque of ways! Red lights burn at the windows of the establishment, but it is no longer as much frequented as it used to be. To snatch a breathing space, the men tend more frequently to catch the figgy snatches of their wives in their fists and squeeze them out. First they tie their pets' feet so that they'll find them again under a new dress. Now they're on intimate terms with their wives, without considering them their equals. The sun shines on the path. The trees stand there. They too are done for now.

The disease, gentlemen, is paving your way to the familiar sex, from which you always used to want to flee. Now trusting your partner is a matter of life or death. The only alternative is a visit to the specialist. To think that back then every route seemed open, and you, dear traveller, would take any one of them, happy in your immortality, and play all the tunes on your mouth organ. To think how glum you tended to be if your instrument was blunt! Now, watching, we twirl each other round on the spine and, steaming with greed, serve ourselves up in our own juice. That terrible regular visitant of sex eats at home now. He likes home cooking best. At last the man and the thing that dangles and dongs before him are one. In the old days he used to keep his wife well clipped as if she were a hedge, now he's the one who's overgrown. A bagatelle. Sooner or later, every man has to learn the knack of ramming his female partner's asshole in peace and tranquillity, for there is no other partner, this woman is quite enough. The men have plumped out now, refleshing and refreshing their senses, which are close to hand. In the old days, every woman used to be

served up as the man wished. Now he empties himself into his own, no problem, she'll wash up after him. The terrible visitant revels in her bed-warm cheeks. He himself is concentrating on keeping up the erection out at the end of his pelvis, where it bubbles and froths. He's forever afraid of being off form and finding some amiable stranger taking his place. Ah, lust! How one would like to make it the cornerstone of self! But I wouldn't go ahead and build on it if I were you.

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?

12

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.

And we're a new human being, mild and gentle, touched by our own beauty. Fine: we'll simply carry on in different packaging. Every woman, as she grows older, will pay her price for washing cutting bedding down and having a wild time. So that it looks as if we have more hair than we really do have in our accounts. All the deeds, all the gateaux we took such pains over: when the work was done we went off aimlessly into the dusk with our forks that were useless now, we ate, washed up, and sank down upon a loved breast, one who shoved us off on four little wheels into the pantry to scrape the remains of life off the pans. And if it hasn't yet happened, we shall soon be exchanged. Just as soon as someone has shaken a regretful head, and rage has spread across the faces of the quarrellers. Then we shall have to be quiet as mice in the emptied room, as if we ourselves were already empty. We never forgive. But neither do we forgive ourselves if we want to plunge into someone else's

rattling senses. It's all senseless. Someone younger will soon replace us entirely, someone bred on new-style health foods. And why me? Why, at over 40, I am hard to get. And weigh in heavier than a child, the scales groaning and straining? Me, who have always tried to address each unanticipated joy as it arrived and have bought myself a new dress.