Intercourse (8 page)

But the man, beaten and covered with sand, vaguely thought that everything, after all, had gone as it was written it should. The idea was in a corner of his consciousness, like a sodden undergarment, where only the beating of his heart was painfully clear. The woman’s arms, hot as fire, were under his armpits, and the odor of her body was a thorn piercing his nose. He abandoned himself to her hands as if he were a smooth, flat stone in a river bed. It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body.
²²

Sand is the element, the woman is the human being surviving in it; to him, they are dangerous, the hole, the trap; he is afraid of what it is to be sunk in them, without a consciousness in reserve to separate him and keep him afloat, above; they are life; and the woman is life’s logic and purpose—otherwise it has no logic, no purpose. In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand—to life moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to the necessities of the woman’s life in the dunes—work, sex, a home, the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminated by voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerously unsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions. The superiority of the woman, like the superiority of the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patient endurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthless simplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in her body, not in his imagination.

In
The Face of Another,
the man is a normal man living in a normal world, except that he has lost the skin on his face; he has lost his physical identity and the sense of well-being and belonging that goes with it. He is stranded as absolutely as the man in the dunes, but he is stranded in the middle of his normal life. He wants touch, he wants love, he wants sex, so desperately; he thinks that he has lost his identity, because he has lost his face; but his wife, who knows him even in his mask, leaves him because he is selfish; no loss of physical identity helps him to transcend his essential obsession with himself; and so she remains unknown to him, someone untouched no matter what he does to or with her when he makes love. Repudiating him, she writes him:

You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.
²³

Pushed by a deep, obsessive desire for sex with his wife, for her love—but also an increasing desire to watch her being unfaithful with the man he is pretending to be—he is unable to transcend the constraints of self-absorption. He gets closest to her when touch becomes a part of his imagination, a means of cognition when he is near her but not literally touching her:

Isn’t it generally rare to imagine by a sense of touch? I did not conceive of you as a glass doll or as abstract word symbols, but had a tactile sense of your presence as I got within touching distance of you. The side of my body next to you was as sensitive as if it had been overexposed to the sun, and each one of my pores panted for breath like dogs sweltering in the heat.
²⁴

She is far from being an object or an abstraction; she is nearly real. His reaction is physical, hot, on his skin; close to touch, closer than when he is actually touching her. When he makes love to her in the dark, touch is a form of greed: “I concentrated on capturing you in every way other than sight: legs, arms, palms, fingers, tongue, nose, ears... your breathing, sighing, the working of your joints, the flexing of your muscles, the secretions of your skin, the vibrations of your vocal cords, the groaning of your viscera. ”
²⁵
Like a man making notches on his bedpost, he uses touch to get as much as he can; his sense of sex is quantitative—each touch of her being capture, while he keeps count. Unable to get out of the bind of his identity, his self-involvement, his use of another as a mirror for himself, he is unable to touch her, even when he touches her, no matter how much he touches her: he can count the times he touches and list the parts he touches, but even inside her, on top of her, listening to “the groaning of your viscera, ” he is not really touching her at all. He does not know who she is, and to know who she is, he would have to be able to forget who he is—both of him. Being naked is interior too, being stripped of ego and greed, to touch and be touched.

In Abe’s world, the ability to know through touch is not peripheral to human experience; it is essential to it. Touch is a central form of cognition, taking the place of intellect and logic. Nothing substitutes for it or equals it in importance. The box man says:

No curiosity can ultimately be satisfied unless one can check by touching with one’s hands. If one wants really to know another person, if one does not know him with one’s fingers, push him, punch him, bend him, tear at him, one can scarcely claim to know him completely. One wants to touch, to pass one’s hands all over him.
²⁶

Touch is the meaning of being human. It is also, says Abe, the way of knowing what being human is, the way of knowing others, the world, anything outside the self, anyone else who is also human; touch is the basis of human knowledge, also of human community. The box man, who sees mostly legs because he lives in a box, is drawn by the legs of a woman. Legs, he speculates, are “covers for the sexual organs, ” attractive because “you’ve got to open the covers with your hands, ” the charm of legs being “tactile rather than visual. ”
²⁷
Leaving his box to touch the woman, he puts one hand on her shoulder from behind; then, because she does not resist, he comes closer. He tells himself “emphatically as I do so that I must forever maintain this closeness. ”
²⁸
Distance is unbearable, the pain is unbearable, he loves in the deepest human way: “Compared to the you in my heart, the I in yours is insignificant. ”
²⁹
When he escapes the pain by touching her, he escapes from time: “time stops just by touching your skin lightly with my fingers, and eternity draws near. ”
³⁰
They touch all the time, even after they have physically separated from intercourse: for instance, he sits at her feet and touches her leg, passing his hand over it, as she peels potatoes. The garbage piles up in the building, but “when you’re touching skin with someone else it seems that your sense of smell undergoes a transformation. ”
³¹
Nothing matters, except being skinless, naked beyond nakedness, this sex that goes beyond intercourse even as it is a metaphor for intercourse. Nothing matters, except the need for touching each other that unites two people, physically fuses them and simultaneously isolates them together from any society outside themselves, any need or obligation outside their need for each other: “We could not imagine things as far as a half year in the future, when the room would be full of garbage. We continued touching one part or another of each other’s bodies the whole day long. ”
³²
Passion, wanting to burn, races against love, which may stop. Not being the same, they create urgency and desperation. For the two people, touching each other naked, absolutely naked, and skinless, absolutely skinless, is life itself; and when the touching stops, when the intercourse stops, when one person is no longer naked, it is as if the skin of the other had in fact been torn off.

Being naked takes on different values, according to the self-consciousness of the one who is naked; or according to the consciousness of the one who is looking at the nakedness. The men are tortured in their minds by the meaning of being naked, especially by the literal nakedness of women but also by their own nakedness: what it means to be seen and to be vulnerable. The nakedness of the women they look at, interpret, desire, associate with acts of violence they want to commit. The women are at ease being naked. The woman in the dunes, sleeping when the man is first there, has covered her face with a towel, but she is naked, except for the light layer of sand that eventually covers her body. He thinks that her nakedness is a sexual provocation, but then, struck by the physical reality of his environment—the sand—decides that “[h]is interpretation of the woman’s nakedness would seem to be too arbitrary. ”
³³
She might not want to seduce him; instead her nakedness might be an ordinary part of her ordinary life, “seeing that she had to sleep during the day and, what was more, in a bowl of burning sand. ”
³⁴
He too, he thinks, would choose to be naked if he could. The woman loved by the box man is naked “but she doesn’t seem to be at all. Being naked suits her too well. ”
³⁵
The wife of the man in the mask is placid, stolid, when naked; he imputes indecency and vileness to her, but being naked does not unnerve or expose her. To the men, a woman’s nakedness is “a nakedness beyond mere nudity. ”
³⁶

Being naked does unnerve the men: it is an ordeal; and being looked at is nearly a terror. The men seem to distract themselves from their own nakedness by looking at women in an abstracting or fetishizing way; the voyeurism, the displaced excitement (displaced to the mind), puts the physical reality of their own nakedness into a dimension of numbed abstraction. The nakedness of the women experienced in the minds of the men is almost a diversion from the experience of being naked as such; naked and, as the box man says, “aware of my own ugliness. I am not so shameless as to expose my nakedness nonchalantly before others. ”
³⁷
Men’s bodies are ugly (“unsightly, ” “the unsightliness of [generic man’s] naked body, ” “ninety-nine percent of mankind is deformed”);
³⁸
it is this ugliness of men that makes the box man think that

[t]he reason men somehow go on living, enduring the gaze of others, is that they bargain on the hallucinations and the inexactitude of human eyes.
³⁹

For men, the meaning of a woman’s naked body is life itself. As an old box man says, “Her naked body should have been an absolute bargaining point for extending my life, for as long as I see her I will not commit suicide. ”
⁴⁰
Men’s nakedness is unbearable to them without the nakedness of a woman; men need women to survive their own nakedness, which is repellent to them, “terribly piteous. ”
⁴¹
The box man cuts off the electricity when the woman dresses because then “the effect of her clothes too will end. If she cannot be seen, that will be the same as her being naked. ”
⁴²
Any means to have her naked is justified because having her naked is life. In the dark, “[s]he will again become gentle. ”
⁴³
He did not want to kill her—“to gouge out her eyes or anything like that”
⁴⁴
—so he made a prison rather than let her go, locked her in a barricaded building in the dark; and now he waits for her to find him. In the dark she will seem naked, if he looks but does not touch.

The men, civilized, in shells of identity and abstraction, are imprisoned in loneliness, unable to break out of their selfpreoccupation. They look, but what they see can only be known through undefended touch, the person naked inside and out. The women are the escape route from mental selfabsorption into reality: they are the world, connection, contact, touch, feeling, what is real, the physical, what is true outside the frenetic self-involvement of the men, the convulsions of their passionate self-regard. Wanting a woman to be naked with, wanting to be skinless with and through her, inside her with no boundaries, is “breaking down the barriers of sex and bursting through my own vileness. ”
⁴⁵
Failing means that the man is “left alone with my loneliness ”
⁴⁶
The skinless fucking may be like “[t]he appetite of meat-eating animals... coarse, voracious, ”
⁴⁷
but wanting fucking without barriers and wanting preservation of self at the same time leaves men
“surfeited with loneliness
”
⁴⁸
The man tries in vain to hold love together: “holding the broken glass together, I barely preserved its form. ”
⁴⁹
He wants love, but on his terms. Unable to transcend ego, to be naked inside and out, or being left alone because passion is burnt out and “when it is burnt out it is over in an instant, ”
⁵⁰
the men use violence—capture, murder, violent revenge. Alienated because of their self-absorption, their thoughts of women are saturated with violence; they dream of violence when they think of the woman they want—spikes through her body, fangs in her neck, cannibalism (“First I shall woo the girl [sic] boldly, and if I am refused... I shall kill her and over a period of days I shall enjoy eating her corpse.... I shall literally put her in my mouth, chew on her, relish her with my tongue. I have already dreamed time and time again of eating her. ”).
⁵¹
Their dreams of her, rooted in their alienation from her, are extravagantly sadistic, this mental violence characterizing their abstracted, self-involved sexual desire. They are also psychologically cruel, users of others, inflicting deep emotional pain, the cruelty being an inevitable part of their intense self-obsession. The wife of the man in the mask writes him that, as a result of his manipulations of her, she feels “as if I had been forced onto an operating table... and hacked up indiscriminately with a hundred different knives and scissors, even the uses of which were incomprehensible. ”
⁵²
The violence that the men dream and the violence that they do ensures that they are lonely forever. Only the man in the dunes is finally in a state resembling happiness, having been beaten up by the woman when he tried to rape her: having a chance now because he failed.