Lust (3 page)

The Man, having shaved for the second time that day, returns to ride the woman like a boat before his flood. Her hills and valleys plus branches etc. offer prospects of plenty, true, but that final perfection conferred by degradation is still lacking. The Man, buoyed up on the breeze, creates the woman. He draws her parting and tosses her legs apart as if her bones had wilted. He beholds God's tectonic faults on her thighs, they do not bother him, he goes climbing in his private mountains taking a safe path that he knows well. He knows every step along the way. How should he fall? It is his own house. And who indeed would not wish to hang his hat on a peg of his own? Property imposes no duties on the owner; it merely prompts envy in his rivals. Years ago, in the Book of Life, this woman shifted into reverse. What can she still be expecting? He reaches under her skirt and batters through the walls of underwear. He wants to force his way into his wife (this is just a family affair) so that he will sense where his limits are. I rather think he

would burst his banks, if it weren't that he's rudderless. He'd be giddy, up there on his own path. All in all, men would quite stand over us if we didn't enclose them within us from time to time, till they are tiny and quiet and quite surrounded. Now the woman involuntarily sticks out her tongue, and why? Because the Direktor has activated a muscle in her jaw, by means of which a snake could spit venom any time, it only needs to be shown how. The Man leads her into the bathroom, giving her his non-stop line of reassuring patter, and bends her over the edge of the tub. He fumbles in her undergrowth. So that he can get in at last without having to wait for the night. He parts her foliage and branches. The tatters of her dress are ripped off. Hair falls into the plughole. Her behind gets a good hiding: where can she be hiding? Where else but behind these gates, which the howling mob will storm and breach at last, the whole amiable crowd of consumers and foodstuff-of-life manufacturers shoving forward to the buffet. Here we are. Our services are required. The woman is offered an organ of similar design or of similar value. He'll screw the ass off her, it's all he wants in life, except to screw the rest of the world and draw his massive monthly salary. A shudder goes through him and he spends his entire sum, far more than any money he could make; how should the woman not be touched by this ray of annunciation? Now she contains the whole man and nothing but the man, as much as she can take; and he maintains the woman, as long as he finds her interior and wallpapering pleasing. He shifts her forequarters into the bathtub. As the proprietor of these and similar premises, he throws her back room open. No client, only he himself, can let in so much fresh air. No one but the Direktor can rain down on her like this. In a short while, with a yell, he will have relieved himself, this enormous horse, eyes rolling, foaming at the mouth, driving the cart right into the dirt. The woman's car is not there for her to drive wherever

she may please; he has already shown her the route she is to take, shooting a track clear through the forest for her.

The woman clumsily kicks her slipper heel out, kicking at this clumsy heel who's slipped inside her. She's heard his private parts slapping like a harvester against the rim of the bath. The kick enrages him. The shit will be sticking to him, what a life. A wily lot, the weaker sex. At pains to look beautiful into the bargain. The Man resolves to command the woman to observe their marriage contract. He claps his hand across her mouth, and is bitten, just a few percent of her jaw power, so he has to withdraw the hand in question. He covers the woman with night. But for her enlightenment and his own satisfaction, he shoves his electricity main up her arse. She tries to shake him off, but quickly tires and has to go through with it, eyes shut. He has no love of the wild. Being so wild himself. All about them is a yawning emptiness in the house: the only signs of life are the bushes of hair on his and her abdomen, a sign that says you can get it on tap right here. This year's wine every day of the year. Can't fool us. Awkward nothings are slobbered into the woman's warm earhole. The power of the Man! No need for trickery or weapons. She need only open the gate, for this is his dwelling place, and it's hard to keep back his seed. With a smile, the Creator brings forth out of men their product, so that it may grow accustomed to dashing about in our midst. The Man distributes Creation at a forceful pace, and meanwhile Time passes at a pace of its own. He smashes the tiling and glass in that shady room, which rejoices beneath his busy endeavours and in the brightness of his light. Only within the woman is it dark. He enters her arse and bangs her face against the edge of the bath. She cries out yet again. The pilot settles in for a lengthy session in his cockpit. He himself may already be at rest, but his cock is pitting itself against the elements, ever onward, cliff to crag.

Such a one dives into the shit as others dive into the sea: throwing the switch marked blow on his appliance, he goes on full throttle until he has totally emptied his dustbag.

2

LATER SHE CALLS FOR her son. Though not so long ago she felt replete with the dear image of her child, her one protective casing to guard against the groping Man, who holds her tighter than a customer holds the drink of his choice. He needs no protection for his sex, and his torrent pours down the nearest channel. The child knows a good deal about all this. The boy peeps grinning through the keyholes, spying out the joys of the home. The boy cops a sly, audacious eyeful of Mother's body, having come in from the wilderness out there, the wilderness his comics call the Wonderland of Childhood. Is that smile on Mother's face adrift like a boat? Or has it been carved into her features? The child can't tell when he snuggles into the nest that Father built. They belong to each other, for the meat inspectors who crowd outside the fence. They even seek each other out, undirected as the potpourri of clouds up there in the purple sky. Not knowing why. Though perhaps they do know: the child has a hungry mouthful of dirty talk to be stopped, talk concerning his mother and the blood that frequently stains her panties. The child knows everything. He is white and his face is brown from the sun. In the evening he will be bathed. He will have prayed. He will have done his work. And he will cling to the woman, graze upon her, bite her nipples to punish her for allowing Father to explore her tunnels and piping. Are you listening? This is language itself, wanting to get a word in.

The miracle of travel is that one encounters an unfamiliar place and then flees it with a shudder. But if one has to remain together, a four-colour poor-quality reproduction of Nature, each belonging entirely to the other, a family, then you will find only the Pope, the kitchen and the Austrian People's Party to honour your work and to grant an indulgence for all the sins it has

committed. The family, this vulture, keeps itself as a pet. The child never listens. There he sits with his secret playthings, which partly consist of disgusting pictures and partly of the original material for those pictures. Son contemplates his little tail. Often his gun is jammed. There the selfish kid squats with his private collection, almost human in his blabbering greed. The Pope has whole libraries of the stuff. Mealtime. As it enters his insensate maw, the Man praises the food his wife has prepared. Today she did the cooking herself! What happens on the plate reaches his place of residence, his address deep down in his gut, where it is tossed to and fro like an eaglet in the spinning air. This is the responsibility of the woman. Of women. The Man questions his wife with mute glances: time to bang the daylights out of her again? But the boy might hear if Father gets into the woman's yawning emptiness now, she tells him, hoping to get away with this excuse. But no: off she is promptly led, in obeisance to the Man's ludic lust. She clings on tight to the bedroom door, but the boundary line is the bathroom, one door further, where the limits have already been tested and exceeded today.

It all happens very quietly. Today, unusually, the Man has come home for lunch. Man takes his animal food from the pastures out there, and yet he does not recognize his four-legged friends when he finds them in the serving dish. At the last, the woman is required to undress. Now we've got more time. The child has been stuffed; it has to sit still at school. But for the woman to be preserved, she first has to plunge into the Man's foaming waves. The Man sees himself as a Noble Savage. Buying his meat at the woman's counter. The family is like a small business, a snack bar in the station. Quite alone, a manikin on one leg, for you can't rely on the second leg, the woman. The Man's claims to his own territory, the divine mountain paths where only he may go a-wandering, have already been registered with the

Austrian Women's Disaster Relief Group. A-frolicking he will go, aloft on the wondrous paths. But every evening at seven on the dot the mountains toss him back down to the eyrie of twigs he collected himself. His wife (he tells Nature with a smile, lying) is waiting. He has to go to lasso her in. He and she together constitute an association for life. A space tiny and bare as memory contains the whole of him. The woman does not die, verily she is created by the sex of the Man. Who has reconstructed a complete original scale model of her lower abdomen in his lab. How the Man loves making his appearances, a body straight from the freezer, thawing as fast as he can!

While his parents, Father burning high as a turned-up flame, Mother a mere breath on a window pane, are at each other, the child is clacking the flap of the letter-box, bored. This winter the school bus occasionally gets stuck in the deep snow. The children, who have cosy homes waiting for them, go hungry. That old knacker Nature forces them to capitulate (marvellous, really, that scourged, purged Nature can still make demands of us). They are put up for the night and read Mickey Mouse comics or other things their fathers haven't approved. They will get sausage in their sleeping bags and feel ill-accommodated. Even cars sometimes crack up in this cold. But we are warm, we are in safety, we are ready for the consecration, at last we are ready to be disillusioned, by our partners. How glad we shall be! Till the manuals on life skills come to offer advice to us, in whom no one can live, telling us not to remain single and peaceful at any cost.

Father falls upon Mother's piggy bank, where she keeps her secrets hidden away from him. All of the hours of the day, and all the hours of the night, he is the only one who pays in. He is beside himself. Already his sex is almost too heavy to lift. His wife can carry it for a while. In the half

sleep of the mornings, he's already fumbling at the furrow in her rear while she is still sleeping, from behind he gropes at her soft hillocks, light, where are you, the heart is already wide awake. The tennis match at his club can wait. It's antiseptic there. First, obedient as children, in go two fingers, into the woman, and then the compact firelighter package is stuffed in to follow. The whole music box where our wishes are stored in the memory of the Supreme Being starts playing music into the ethereal realms. All things will be fulfilled. We have a right to expect it will be so. Take a deep breath! We well know what is best, it's back home on the sideboard. The Man takes hold of his wooden ding-a-ling and batters at the woman's astounded rear entry. She can hear the engine of his loins roaring closer from afar. She's beginning to banish all feeling from within her. But there's still room in the boot! And into the boot goes the heavy genital load, don't worry about the smell. The seats can't be kept clean anyway. Blindly the woman cashes in her security from the Man's spitting dispenser. He is milking her breasts. Let us be at home now. The trees have cast down the leafage of the mountains. The evergreen Man, he does not need to seek the woman's protection, he is mantled in goodwill, not a cloud in the sky. How happy property is to dwell with us. There is no better place for it to occupy than our genitals, which gape wide above it like crags above a torrent. In return this woman gets her life paid out in cash, smack on the table every month, for her everyday oven. Tomorrow once more for the child she will open the door from school into life, this too has been purchased by the Man, and he roasts his hefty sausage in her oven, in its flaky pastry case of hair and skin. But the school bus is stuck fast.

The woman suggests that the child has to eat too. Her husband does not hear. He is leafing abstractedly through his pocket dictionary. The house belongs to him. Already his Word has arrived there and will be taken to heart. He

opens wide his wife's genitals to see if his signature there is legible. Angrily he drives his tongue in. It is a knack he acquired out of nowhere one day when he returned from the office. Joyous, the Direktor is a god. And soon he will be in the office joking with his secretary. He has to make a good showing! He tries out ever new positions from which to kick his cart down into his wife's quiet waters and start paddling like a maniac. He doesn't need water wings, he'll never pull one of those plastic things over his red head simply to stay in good health. His wife has been healthy for the longest of times anyway. She writhes beneath him and cries out as a whole herd of seeds plunge stampeding from his well-appointed glans. What's the matter. Only someone who need have no worry about a position or income can clink the ice cubes as loud as this.

This Man, who is now holding his pet tight in the clamp of his thighs, to bite the cheeks and pinch the tits, did after all devise a strategy of his own to cut the firm down to the essential core. Yes, you saw right! And you'll see more still when the gates are thrown open in the morning and the bowed backs of the gleaming herd (having drunk enough) — when they've barely had time to register the sun — disappear again into the darkness and hang up their fate to dry. Right. And every so often one of them is still in his dripping wraps. Who will have mercy on us? Rather let an excessive surplus be earned for the company, than that the superfluous ones, true at least to their wretched names, should earn something for their own homes and gardens. Profit for the foreign multi-national that owns the paper mill. So that he can start up from his sleep bawling, wrap all of us in paper, and gobble us up. The child has his workshop where he is housed and shaped up. At Christmas he performed a solo, standing in front of the manger where there was a dear little child such as himself. This year the snow fell