The Naughty Bits (5 page)

A few days passed as best they might; my only friend was the forest and the great solitude. Dear God, I had never known such solitude as on the first of these days. It was full Spring; I found wintergreen and yarrow in the fields, and the chaffinches had arrived; I knew all the birds. Sometimes I took a couple of coins from my pocket and chinked them together to break the solitude. I thought: what if Diderik and Iselin came along!

Soon there began to be no night; the sun barely dipped his face into the sea and then came up again, red, refreshed, as if he had been down to drink. How strangely affected I was sometimes these nights; no man would believe it. Was Pan sitting in a tree watching to see how I would act? And was his belly open; and was he crouching so that he seemed to sit and drink from his own belly? But all this he did just to keep one eye cocked on me; and the whole tree shook with his silent laughter when he saw all my thoughts running away with me. In the forest there was rustling everywhere; animals snuffled, birds called to each other, their whirring mingled with that of the moths so that there was a sound as of whispering back and forth all over the forest. How much there was to hear! For three nights I did not sleep, I thought of Diderik and Iselin.

See, I thought, they might come. And Iselin would lure Diderik over to a tree and say: “Stand here, Diderik, and watch, keep guard over Iselin; that hunter shall tie my shoelace.”

And I am that hunter and she will sign to me with her eyes so that I may understand. And when she comes, my heart understands all and it no longer beats, it booms. And she is naked under her dress from head to foot and I place my hand on her.

“Tie my shoelace!” she says with flaming cheeks. And in a little while she whispers against my mouth, against my lips: “Oh, you are not tying my shoelace, you my dearest heart, you are not tying . . . not tying my . . .”

But the sun dips his face into the sea and comes up again, red, refreshed, as if he had been down to drink. And the air is filled with whispers.

An hour later she says against my mouth: “Now I must leave you.”

And she waves back to me as she goes and her face is still flaming, her face is tender and ecstatic. Again she turns to me and waves.

But Diderik steps forth from the tree and says: “Iselin, what were you doing? I saw you.”

She answers: “Diderik, did you see? I did nothing.”

“Iselin, I saw you do it,” he says again. “I saw.”

Then her loud and happy laughter sounds through the forest and she walks away with him, exulting and sinful from head to foot. And where does she go? To the next one, a hunter in the forest.

It was midnight. [My dog] Aesop had broken loose and was out hunting on his own; I heard him baying up in the hills and when I finally had him again it was one o’clock. A goatherd girl came along; she was knitting a stocking and humming and looking about her. But where was her flock? And what was she doing there in the forest at midnight? Nothing, nothing. Perhaps she was restive, perhaps just glad to be alive, what does it matter? I thought: she has heard Aesop barking and knows I am out in the forest.

When she came, I stood up and looked at her and saw how young and slender she was. Aesop also stood and looked at her.

“Where are you from?” I asked her.

“From the mill,” she answered.

But what could she have been doing in the mill so late at night?

“How is it that you dare to walk here in the forest so late at night,” I said, “you who are so young and slender?”

She laughed and answered: “I am not so young, I am nineteen.”

But she could not have been nineteen, I am convinced that she was lying and was only seventeen. But why did she lie and pretend to be older?

“Sit down,” I said, “and tell me what they call you.”

And, blushing, she sat down by my side and said she was called Henriette.

I asked: “Have you a sweetheart, Henriette, and has he ever embraced you?”

“Yes,” she answered with an embarrassed laugh.

“How many times already?”

She remains silent.

“How many times?” I repeated.

“Twice,” she said softly.

—translated by James W. McFarlane

from
Elegy XIX: “To His Mistress Going to Bed”

JOHN DONNE

Let us praise Eve. Without her impertinent nibble, we’d never have had the joy of undressing or of being undressed. Nudity is nice—I am wont to walk the beach un-thonged, slide between the sheets pajamaless, and once I attended a party where the requisite costume was none —but naked skin requires a having been clothed–ness to actualize its full appeal. A world without clothes would display its nudity like scenes from
National Geographic,
or, worse still, like the aging hippie leftovers in the nudist colonies of Goa on the western coast of India. And nude beach paddle ball is not a pretty sight. The oft-sublime French literary critic Roland Barthes makes a big deal of disclosure in the context of concealment, of the need for covering to make exposure. He’s right, of course. Have you ever met someone who says they have no secrets? When they tell you something personal, it’s like it doesn’t matter. Lovers, like literature, are best when they’re a dance of a thousand veils, ever concealing, ever revealing, keeping you guessing, keeping you piqued.

Early Western literature, despite its infrequent use of narrative suspense, tended to take a staggered approach to the unconcealing of the body. The Song of Solomon made famous the literary device the blazon, where each component of the body was described singly and in turn: your hair is like such and such, your eyes like . . . , your cheeks like . . . , your neck like, your breasts . . . This is, in effect, a kind of narrative strip tease, presenting to the reader’s eye one morsel at a time, allowing each to be visualized and processed before moving on to the next. In the Song the descriptions are outlandish, and only occasionally sexy; subsequent literature would raise the ante, culminating in the seventeenth century with John Donne’s justly famous “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Here Donne describes both raiment and remainder, what he wants her to take off and what he knows lies beneath. No poet ever crafted images as opalescent as Donne’s, and no subject, to my eye, is as worthy as the human body. Here is the highest beauty given its deserved due.

Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labor, I in labor lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th’ eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown, going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowry meads th’ hill’s shadow steals.
Off with that wiry coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven’s angels used to be
Received by men; thou, Angel, bring’st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite:
Those set our hairs on end, but these our flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atalanta’s balls, cast in men’s views,
That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus arrayed;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see revealed. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to a midwife, show
Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
There is no penance due to innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?

from
Le morte d’Arthur

THOMAS MALORY

When most people think of medieval literature, they think of knights and damsels, shining armor and battles on horseback. It would probably surprise them to hear that for centuries there was more literature written about penitential sacraments than about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The French tradition has the most chivalric lit, from its appropriately famous
chansons de geste
to Chrétien de Troyes to the prose Lancelot and beyond. Together, these tales are the
Rambos
of the Middle Ages, centered around bad-ass heroes who ride around and off a lot of chumps. In England things were a little tamer. No chivalric cycle was penned in English until Malory’s
Le morte d’Arthur
in the fifteenth century, and even that has a French name (meaning “the death of Arthur”). Our association of knights and England probably has as much to do with Monty Python as with the actual literary tradition.

Le morte d’Arthur
is, nonetheless, among the finest presentations of the medieval concept of chivalry (in its twilight). Knighthood in Malory’s Arthuriad is based on three principles: fighting well, speaking well, and being good to women. If you’ve got those down, you’re pretty much in business. Lancelot is the
über
-stud in all these categories, not only kicking everybody’s butt (all the time) but also cuckolding Arthur with Queen Guinevere (“Lancelot . . . wente to bedde with the quene . . . and toke hys plesaunce and hys lykynge untyll hit was the dawning of the day”). Which is all well and good, but the real sex in
Le morte d’Arthur
happens in the pavilions (tents), set up here and there in the forests where the knights ride. And it rarely happens with the intended person. Somehow, by quirk of fate, lighting, or narrative necessity, the errant knights stumble into pavilions where someone happens to be waiting for a midnight tryst. The knights bed down, a little hanky gets pankied, they realize the mistaken identity, and end up falling in love.

Sometimes. Not, as it turns out, if the bedmates are the same sex. Finding a beard on your unseen smoochee is a bit of a problem for these long-lanced cavaliers. And if the cavalier is Lancelot, look out. In the original French version of this tale, Lancelot confuses his bedmate for a woman. A fight ensues and he kills the would-be amorist. Oops. In Malory’s version the error is discovered more quickly, and it ends more comically than tragically. The moral to the story? Look before you lip.

Then within an hour there came to the pavilion the knight who owned it. He thought that his mistress would be lying in the bed, so he lay himself down alongside Sir Lancelot and took him in his arms and began to kiss him. When Lancelot felt a rough beard kissing him, he jumped quickly out of bed, and the other knight did the same. Both of them grabbed their swords, the first knight ran out of the pavilion and Lancelot followed him. And there by a little valley Lancelot wounded him right close to death. And so the knight surrendered to Lancelot, who accepted, so that he could tell him why he had come into the bed.

“Sir,” said the knight, “the tent is mine. And I had asked my mistress to have slept with me here tonight, and now instead I am likely to die of this wound.”

“Ah, yes. Sorry about that.”

—modernized by Jack Murnighan

from
Cat and Mouse

GÜNTER GRASS

I never got to meet any members of the Circle Jerks, so I never got to ask them a question that has long mystified me. Modern literature is speckled with scenes of adolescent boys getting together to pull their puds en masse, but how widespread is the phenomenon? I, having had no childhood friends, am in a less authoritative position to say than most other people. The fact that I was never invited to one only means that they are no more common than birthday parties or trips to the roller rink. Nor, however, have any of the adult friends I’ve spoken to had the peculiar experience of wanking alongside a troupe of his classmates. Were we just the weird kids, left out of a truly common cultural event, or is the circle jerk something of an urban myth, exaggerated from its infrequent occurrence into apparent ultranormalcy? I have no idea, and I doubt I ever will.

I do keep reading about them, however—most recently in
Cat and
Mouse,
the second novel of Nobel Prize–winner Günter Grass. When you debut with a novel as prodigious as
The Tin Drum,
you set yourself up for a pretty nasty sophomore slump. But Grass was wise; he scaled back his ambitions (and his page count—
Cat
and Mouse
is barely more than a novella) and succeeded in creating a laugh-a-page character study of a mythic wartime teen, Joachim Mahlke. Most of
Cat and Mouse
is staged around a half-submerged minesweeper in the Baltic off of Gdansk (then Danzig). A cadre of underachieving boys sits around picking gull droppings off the protruding hull (and eating them—yuck!) and occasionally diving into the black water, trying to salvage what they can from the ship. And Mahlke is their hero; only he makes it into the interior chambers of the vessel; only he dredges up lucre of any value; only he wears a screwdriver on a cord around his neck to aid in his liberations. And only he bears two other peculiar traits: an enormous Adam’s apple that bobs constantly (the mouse of the title), and a similarly oversized, similarly bobbing southerly analog, the principal of the following passage. If circle jerks don’t happen in life, they still make great literature.