The Naughty Bits (24 page)

Then we become aware of the bouncing of the train and the rhythmic way the soldier’s thighs are rubbing against the thighs of the widow . . . He is watching the large gold cross between the widow’s breasts swing back and forth in her deep cleavage. Bump. Pause. Bump. It hits one moist breast and then the other. It seems to hesitate in between as if paralyzed between two repelling magnets. He is hypnotized. She stares out the window, looking at each olive tree as if she had never seen olive trees before . . . He rests his left hand on the seat between his thigh and hers and begins to wind rubber fingers around and under the soft flesh of her thighs. She continues staring at each olive tree as if she were God and had just made them and were wondering what to call them . . .

Then the fingers are sliding between her thighs and they are parting her thighs, and they are moving upward into the fleshy gap between her heavy black stockings and her garters and they are sliding up under her garters into the damp unpantied place between her legs.

The train enters a galleria, or tunnel, and in the semi-darkness the symbolism is consummated. There is the soldier’s boot in the air and the dark walls of the tunnel and the hypnotic rocking of the train and the long high whistle as it finally emerges.

Wordlessly, she gets off at a town called, perhaps, Bivona.

from
The Art of Love

OVID

Knowing my penchant for long-deceased authors and moldering books, I am occasionally asked who I would like to have been and what I would most like to have written. Few authors of truly great works lived enviable lives: Who would want to be Milton, the supremely cantankerous self-proclaimed “church of one,” or the miasmic Plotinus, rotting publicly from the inside out, or, even worse, to be burned at the stake, like Julian of Norwich when she dared suggest that God’s love was universal? It’s a commonplace that authors live meager and brutish lives, so much so that one wonders if it’s worth it to be a Dostoevsky in order to write a Brothers K.

But then there is that lucky group of writers whose lives were as extraordinary as their work. Rimbaud set poetry on its heels before he was twenty, then got bored and started running guns in North Africa. Marlowe was the jewel of the pre-Shakespearean stage and his generation’s preeminent rake and ladies’ man. The earl of Rochester was so charming and handsome that for more than a century after his death popular drama in England was still modeling characters after him.

It is not, however, from among these fortunates that I would pick my dream life. No, without a moment’s hesitation, I would choose to be Ovid, the Roman poet born forty years before Christ, author of, among other works, the
Metamorphoses
and the
Ars amatoria
(The Art of Love). These two texts bespeak the glory of both the literary and personal halves of Ovid’s life, set in perfect harmony. The former work is one of the great acts of imagination in the history of literature and has been a deserved best-seller for two millennia. The latter is a raucous love manual from someone who clearly knew women, loved women and spent his life figuring out how to snare them. Though predominantly for men,
The Art of Love
concludes with a section for the ladies, on how to behave when caught. Elsewhere Ovid gives makeup tips and rules of conduct, but here he advises on the vagaries of bedroom performance in what reads like a head-on challenge to Cynthia Heimel.

We must come to the heart of the matter, so that my weary keel reaches the haven at last . . . In our last lesson we deal with matters peculiarly secret; Venus reminds us that here lies her most intimate care. What a girl ought to know is herself, adapting her method, taking advantage of the methods nature has equipped her to use. Lie on your back if your face and all your features are pretty; if your posterior is cute, better be seen from behind. Milanion used to bear Atalanta’s legs on his shoulders; if you have beautiful legs, let them be lifted like hers. Little girls do all right if they sit on top, riding horseback; Hector’s Andromache knew she could not do this: too tall! Press the couch with your knees and bend your neck backward a little if your view, full-length, seems what a lover should crave. If the breasts and the thighs are youthful and lovely to look at, let the man stand and the girl lie on a slant on the bed. Let your hair come down, in the Laodamian fashion. If your belly is lined, better be seen from behind. There are a thousand ways: a simple one, never too tiring, is to lie on your back, turning a bit to the right. My muse can give you the truth, more truth than Apollo or Ammon; take it from me, what I know took many lessons to learn.

Let the woman feel the act of love to her marrow, let the performance bring equal delight to the two. Coax and flatter and tease, with inarticulate murmurs, even with sexual words, in the excitement of play, and if nature, alas, denies you the final sensation cry out as if you had come, do your best to pretend. Really I pity the girl whose place, let us say, cannot give her pleasure it gives to the man, pleasure she ought to enjoy. So, if you have to pretend, be sure the pretense is effective, do your best to convince, prove it by rolling your eyes, prove by your motions, your moans, your sighs, what a pleasure it gives you.

So our sport has an end: our swans are tired of their harness. Time for their labors to rest, time to step down from our car. As the young men did, now let the girls, my disciples, write on the votive spoil, “Ovid showed us the way.”

—translated by Rolfe Humphries

from
The Romance of the Rose

JEAN DE MEUN

The Romance of the Rose
was the most popular literary work of the 1200s. Reading this excerpt, I think you’ll understand why. It was started in the first half of the century by a relatively conservative Frenchman, Guillaume de Lorris, who died having written only four thousand lines. Forty years later, the poem was taken up again by a saucy wisecrack, Jean de Meun, who employed Lorris’ Christian allegorical frame and added eighteen thousand more lines to sneak in some seriously scandalous content. The crazy thing is: he got away with it. A hundred years later, when Christine de Pisan, France’s first professional woman writer, started a letter campaign to complain about the
Romance
’s explicit discussions of male genitalia, she was attacked by the top religious figures of the century. Somehow the
Romance
was accepted, and copies of it spread around Europe, influencing the greatest writers of the day (Chaucer translated it, Dante adapted it, and everybody stole from it).

The passage that follows is from the end, when the main character, the Good Lover, finally gets the chance to pluck the allegorical rose he’s been after for the whole book. Now a case might be made that the
Romance
’s rose is no ordinary rose, and that the Lover’s staff and sack are not just for walking and carrying, but if you, with your lascivious leanings, detect any sexual innuendo in the following scene (gasp!), I need only remind you that it is meant to represent the heart of a good Christian embracing the true teaching of the Church. And naughty you if you think otherwise!

After that, I made my way like a loyal lover
Toward the beautiful aperture,
The goal of all my pilgrimage.

With all my effort, I brought with me
A scrip and a staff, so stiff and sturdy…
Quite well-made, of supple skin without a seam.
Nor was it empty. Nature, who gave it to me,
Had placed with great care two hammers therein . . .

I tell you truly, I love my scrip and hammers
Better even than my lute and harp;
I was honored that Nature gave me such fine ones,
And learned to use them wise and well.
Nature also gave me my staff
And I learned to polish it before I could even read . . .
It makes me happy to gaze on it, and, feeling so,
I thank Nature for her present.
It has comforted me in many places; I always carry it,
And it always serves me well.
Do you know what I do?
When I am on a journey
And happen upon a hidden place,
I thrust my staff into dark ditches,
Or test the depth of deep fords.
Some I find so deep,
Or with banks so far apart,
That it would be less trouble to swim two miles
In the sea . . .

Now let us leave such wide roads
To those who like to travel them,
And let those of us who prefer footpaths to cart roads
Follow those more joyously . . .
I had a great desire to touch the relics,
And with my staff unsheathed,
I, a happy, vigorous lad,
Knelt between the two pillars,
For I had great desire to adore
With devout and pious heart,
The beautiful statue, so worthy of devotion . . .

I lifted the curtain a bit
That covered the relics,
Wishing to approach the statuary
That I knew was close to the relics.
I wanted to kiss it devoutly,
And to push within its sheath,
And place myself there with full assurance;
Entering with my staff with the sack hanging behind.
I thought I’d be able to poke in easily,
But when I tried, it popped back out.
I tried again, but to no avail. It always popped back.
There was no way I could get it in,
For, I soon discovered, there was an inner barrier,
That I felt but could not see . . .

I had to attack it vigorously . . .
But finally found a narrow passage
That I might enter. With my staff,
I battered the barrier, hoping to make my way in,
But I couldn’t even get half way.
I was frustrated that I could make no headway,
Nor find a way to go any further . . .
It was clear I was the first to try to pass,
It was not so well known as yet to collect tolls from other travelers.
I don’t know if anyone else has enjoyed it as much since,
But for me I loved it so much I could scarcely believe it . . .
At last, I spurted a little seed on the bud, having
Touched it to play with the petals . . .
All the seed got so mixed together,
And that’s how I made the tender rosebush widen.

—translated by Jack Murnighan

from
Autumn of the Patriarch

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Gabriel García Márquez is primarily known, in this country at least, for his monumental
One Hundred
Years of Solitude
(Bill Clinton’s favorite book), yet I believe his subsequent work,
El Otono
del Patriarca (The Autumn of
the Patriarch),
to be an even finer literary achievement. For a long time I read nothing but
Autumn;
it seemed so complete, so lyrical and poignant, so exquisitely sad and oceanic that I would finish and, instead of starting something new, I’d just pick it up and read it again.

My respect for him is so great, it halts my pen. I feel like I’m one of those proverbial monkeys given typewriters and eternity, who looks up from his own page of garble and sees Hamlet emerging from his neighbor’s keys. Both
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
Autumn of the
Patriarch
are so far beyond what virtually any other contemporary writer has written you wonder if he didn’t find some manuscripts in a crashed UFO. Reading García Márquez at his finest gives you the impression that there is nothing more important in this god-lost world than writing, but he’s so good he makes you never want to write again yourself.

But alas, we beat on. For even the master himself has not been himself in the last twenty-five years. No surprise, perhaps, for the reaction to the 1974 release of
Autumn
was probably a major disappointment to the writer at the height of his powers. Though at least as ambitious, the book was nowhere near as well received as
One Hundred Years
(released seven years prior).
Autumn
is a masterpiece, but it’s a difficult read, and the three-page sentences and fifty-page paragraphs try the patience of many readers. Consequently even today it lingers in partial recognition.

The following passage, however, is not only wonderfully sexy and evocative, but demonstrates in miniature the snowfall rhythm and complexity of the novel, which, rereading it now, tempts me again never to read anything else.

I couldn’t conceive of the world without the man who made me happy at the age of twelve as no other man was ever to do again since those afternoons when after school he would be lying in wait for the girls in blue uniforms with sailors’ collars, he would call to us, entice us with candy, they all ran off frightened, all except me, when no one was watching I tried to reach the candy and he grabbed me by the wrists with a gentle tiger’s claw and lifted me painlessly up into the air with such care that not a pleat in my dress was wrinkled and he laid me down on the urine-scented hay, he was more frightened than I, you could see his heart beating under his jacket, he was pale, his eyes were full of tears, he touched me in silence with a tenderness I never found again, he made my little buds stand out on my breasts, he put his fingers underneath the edge of my panties, he smelled his fingers, he told me, it’s your smell, I didn’t need the candy any more to climb through the stable skylight to find him waiting for me with his bag of things to eat, he used bread to soak up my first adolescent sauce, he would put things there before eating them, he gave them to me to eat, he put asparagus stalks into me to eat them marinated with the brine of my inner humors, delicious, he told me, you taste like a port . . . he left me to boil in the incandescent fleeting mallow sunsets of our love with no future telling me that not even he himself knew who he was. . . .

—translated by Gregory Rabassa,
modified by Jack Murnighan

from
“Libido”