Emmanuelle (7 page)

“No.’’

“Aren’t you just saying that to please me?”

“You know I’m not. If you weren’t the best of mistresses, I’d admit it to you—to help you improve. But I really don’t see what more you could learn. After all, there must be a limit to the art of love.”

Emmanuelle seemed thoughtful. “I don’t know.” She frowned. The sound of her voice showed that her doubt was unfeigned. “In any case, I’m sure I’m still a long way from the limit.”

“What makes you think that?” exclaimed Jean.

She did not answer.

“You don’t think I’m a good judge?” he insisted.

“Oh, yes!”

“Not a good teacher, then? You seem to be suddenly dissatisfied with your amorous education.”

She hastened to reassure him. “Darling! No one in the world could have taught me better than you. But it’s hard to explain . . . I have a feeling that in love there must be something more important, more intelligent than simply knowing how to make it well.”

“Are you referring to devotion, congeniality, tenderness?”

“No, no! I’m sure the something important I’m talking about is related to physical love. But that doesn’t mean it’s a matter of more knowledge, skill, or ardor. It may be a state of mind, a mentality.” She caught her breath. “I don’t know, actually, if it’s a question of a limit, either. Suppose it were a question of a viewpoint, a way of seeing things . . .”

“A different way of looking at love?”

“Not only love. Everything!”

“Can’t you explain yourself more clearly?”

She woefully thrust out her lips and rolled the curls of her pubic hair around her long, pearly fingernails, as though to help herself meditate.

“No,” she concluded, “it’s not clear in my mind. I know there’s some kind of progress I have to make, something I lack and have to find before I can be a real woman, really your wife. But I don’t know what it is!” Her voice became sorrowful. “I thought I knew so many things, but what are they, compared to what I don’t know?” She frowned with impatience. “The first thing I have to do is to become more intelligent. You see, I don’t know anything, I’m too innocent. I’m too virginal. It’s horrible how virginal I feel tonight! Virginal all over, bristling with virginity. It’s shameful.”

“My pure angel!”

“Oh, no, not pure! Not pure at all! A virgin isn’t necessarily pure. But she’s necessarily stupid.”

He kissed her, delighted with her. She persisted: “A virgin is full of prejudices.”

“It’s adorable to hear you complaining about your innocence when I’ve just been ravished by your chaste lips!”

Her face brightened, but was she convinced? “Ah, if that’s really how a girl gets her intelligence, I won’t let another minute go by without learning more from you.”

This reminder had an effect on him that she did not take long to discover. Ready to carry out her promise, she sat up and put her tongue out between her wet teeth . . . But he held her back. “Who told you that intelligence entered only through
that
mouth. It’s like the wind—it blows where it pleases.”

He lay on her and she immediately wanted to be taken as much as he wanted to take her. She opened her sex herself, with her fingertips. She guided his glans and helped it to plunge into her. Her knees rose, flanking his body, while his hardened organ sank into her belly as it had sunk into her throat a short time earlier. She wished she could feel it in her mouth at the same time. The exuberance of her imagination made up for what was lacking in reality—her lips, licked by her tongue, believed they could taste the salty sweetness of his sperm. She dreamed she was drinking it; the pleasure of her belly filled her throat and she said imploringly, “Come in me!”

She felt that the orifice of her womb, at the bottom of her vagina, had fused with his phallus and was sucking it inward. She wanted him to ejaculate; she tried, with all the persuasion of her belly and hips, to draw his vital fluid from him. Each muscle of her body did its part to make her a supple, agile animal, clinging to him and making him tremble with pleasure. But he wanted to overcome her, to make her reach orgasm first. He stabbed her rapidly and violently with the full length and thickness of his penis, not sparing her, clenching his teeth; he avidly listened to her moans, smelled her fragrance, felt her warmth and watched her while she writhed and winced as though beneath a whip, clawed his neck and finally cried out so loudly and so long that she became breathless and suddenly calm, dazed, humbled, serene, scarcely feeling her body, but already eager for the excitement to be reborn in her mind.

She wanted him to lie still for a moment. He knew it and remained motionless, his cheek against hers. The tide of her night-black hair caressed his lips. They stayed that way for they did not know how long. Then he heard her gasping in his ear: “Am I dead?”

“No. I’m your life.” He embraced her and she quivered. “Oh, my love, it’s true that we’re one. I’m only a piece of you.” She put her lips to his and kissed him with all the strength and tenderness of her mouth. “Take me again! Deeper! Open me. Tear me . . . Come in my heart!” She begged him and, at the same time, laughed at her own absurdity. “Deflower me! Oh, I love you! Deflower me!”

He took up the game. “Give yourself more. Yield. Be compliant. Do whatever I want.”

“Yes!” she murmured, intoxicated with submission. “Yes! Do anything you want. Don’t ask me. Do it!”

She wished she could surrender still more, be more obedient, more obliging, more open. “Is there any greater happiness than consenting?” she elatedly asked herself. This thought was enough to drive her across the thin line that separated her from orgasm.

Then, when she was again a felled animal, a happy trophy in the shadow of the hunter, she said, “Do you think I’m the woman you want?”

He contented himself with kissing her.

“But I want to become that woman even more!”

“You do, every day.”

“Are you sure?”

He smiled at her confidently. She stopped worrying. A nocturnal current was flowing in her veins, making her sluggish, closing her lips. She tried to fight the pleasure that was blurring her mind.

“It must have been Marie-Anne who got me upset like that,” she heard herself saying, to her own surprise, because that was not what she wanted to confide to Jean.

“Why Marie-Anne?”

“She’s a very sophisticated little girl.”

Emmanuelle no longer felt like talking, but Jean insisted.

“Do you think she’s the one who’s going to reveal the mysteries of life to you?”

“Why not?”

The idea amused him. “Have you already had a glimpse of her talents?”

She hesitated a little and finally said “No,” so absorbed in another world that she did not care whether he believed her or not. Then she smiled at an image that was not out of place on the shore where her dreams had landed. “But I’d like to!”

“I see,” Jean said indulgently. He rocked her gently. “My little virgin wants to make love with Marie-Anne, doesn’t she? Is that what’s bothering you?”

She nodded methodically with the exaggeration that one puts into one’s gestures when one wants to make oneself understood without opening one’s eyes. “It’s not only that, but it’s surely that, too,” she agreed.

He made fun of her benignly: “With a little girl!”

But a big spoiled-child pout already delineated her night face, and her voice protested from far away, deadened and withdrawn, as though from the trough of a wave: “I have a right to want to, haven’t I?”

They lay side by side, joined at the shoulders and hips. She was careful not to move, so that not one drop would escape from her.

“Sleep,” said Jean.

“Wait . . .”

From a distant room came the regular notes of a set of chimes. Her hand slowly descended to her belly. Her fingers touched her clitoris and penetrated her sex, gorged with sperm. She saw Marie-Anne’s thighs open before her closed eyes, and to each caress in her dream she responded with an identical one. When she knew that Marie-Anne was about to surrender, she cried out even more loudly than she had done in Jean’s arms. Propped up on one elbow, he smiled as he watched her reach her climax, naked and luminous with pleasure, with one hand held captive by her belly while the other alternately pressed both her breasts. Her legs quivered fitfully long after her forehead, eyelids, and lips had taken on the immobile softness of sleep.

3

Of Breasts,
Goddesses, and Roses

In the midst of my own arms I made myself another woman.

—Paul Valéry,
La Jeune Parque

Here, and till evening. The rose of shadows will turn on the
walls. The rose of hours will silently shed its petals. The bright
fiagstones will lead as they please these steps in love with day.

—Yves Bonnefoy,
Hier régnant désert

Emmanuelle wanted to go to the club to swim, not to listen to gossip, so she decided to go there in the morning. She swam the length of the pool ten times, lithely, caring nothing about the looks of the few men who were present at that hour. The repeated motion of her arms above her head had made her breasts come out of her strapless bathing suit. Each time she rolled on her side, the streaming water made their shape stand out and gave a satiny gloss to their skin. A fine circular furrow had appeared around their tips; the edges of their areolas thus seemed to be raised, forming an atoll. If it had not been for this detail, which recalled the vulnerability of their soft flesh and evoked its juicy taste, their contours might have been too perfect to be exciting; they might have looked too much like the breasts of a statue.

When, panting from this exercise, she took hold of the chrome uprights of the ladder, she saw that the exit was blocked. Ariane de Saynes was standing on the glazed edge of the pool, leaning over her.

“Roadblock!” she said, laughing. “Show your credentials!”

Emmanuelle was annoyed that one of the “idiots” had found her, but she smiled as best she could.

“So here you are, playing like a water sprite when honest women are doing their shopping! Why all this secrecy?”

“But you’re here, too,” Emmanuelle pointed out.

She tried to climb out of the pool. Ariane was in no hurry to let her pass.

“Ah, with me it’s not the same thing,” she said, with a show of mystery. But Emmanuelle did not ask her to elucidate.

Ariane calmly examined her prisoner’s charms. “You’re built divinely!” she said with admiration.

She pronounced her judgment in a tone of conviction and Emmanuelle told herself that, actually, she did not seem malicious. She might be a little wild, but there could be no doubt that she was stimulating, invigorating. Emmanuelle no longer had to force herself so much in order to be friendly.

Ariane finally stepped away from the ladder. Emmanuelle climbed out of the pool. She calmly pushed her breasts back into her bathing suit, or rather the lower half of her breasts (nearly all of the nipples remained visible), and sat down beside Ariane. Two tall, Nordic-looking young men came up and began talking to them in English. Ariane answered good-humoredly. It mattered little to Emmanuelle that she could not understand what they were saying. Ariane turned to her abruptly and asked, “Do these two appeal to you?”

Emmanuelle made a little grimace and Ariane notified the two candidates that they had failed. Apparently without rancor, they laughed loudly. But they still showed no inclination to leave. Emmanuelle thought they looked incredibly simple-minded. A short time later, Ariane stood up with determination and pulled her by the arm.

“They’re boring. Come to the diving board with me.”

The two women climbed up the twenty-five feet to the platform and lay on their stomachs, side by side, on the rope matting that covered it. Ariane quickly took off her two-piece bathing suit.

“You can sunbathe in the nude,” she said. “From here, you can see people coming.”

But Emmanuelle had no desire to be naked in front of Ariane at that moment. She stammered an unconvincing explanation —her tight bathing suit was not easy to take off and put on again . . . the sun was too hot . . .

“You’re right,” conceded Ariane. “It’s better to get used to it gradually.”

They soon sank into a semi-lethargy. Emmanuelle decided that, after all, Ariane had her good points. She liked people with whom she could be with without talking. It was Emmanuelle, however, who broke the silence.

“What can one do here, aside from the pool, cocktail parties, and social evenings here and there? Don’t you finally get a little bored?”

Ariane whistled, as though she had just heard something outrageous.

“What an idea! There’s no shortage of pastimes here! I won’t say anything about movies, nightclubs, and other trifles like that. But you can ride, play golf, tennis, or squash, go water-skiing on the river, or drift along the canals in romantic melancholy. And you can visit pagodas too. Why not? There are close to a thousand of them. At the rate of one a day, you’ll have enough to keep you busy for three years. Going to the sea is worth the trip. The beaches are fantastic, endlessly long and wide, lined with coconut trees, deserted, with seashells all over them. The water is fabulously phosphorescent at night, full of billions of little creatures. The coral tickles your feet. And the sharks come and eat out of your hand.”