A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (14 page)

Then Beauboy, with the groom hopping childishly alongside, flung himself forward to Sapphire, rearing a little at each step; and at the same time held up his penis, clenched it, as you might clench your fist for a fight, drew it, as you might draw a great crudely whittled arrow against a bow, then reared almost straight up the moment he reached her, and dropped his terrible forelegs over her back. Then, probably because I could no longer look at anything but the main thing, it seemed to me that the great phallus took charge of its operation itself; it seemed that it could not only feel but practically see, with its slant eye which soon, soon would weep; it seemed that it knowingly worked its way through the troublesome wrinkled lips, skillfully, as though sending a rocket, aiming at a target.

He must have given her eight or ten strokes, no, not that many; strokes perhaps two feet long, no, not that long. For in his strange striding position he was able to use only half to two-thirds of his penis. In the fine rosy part open like a wound between Sapphire’s rust-red hindquarters surely there was more room than he needed. Also, first and last, there was more convulsion of his whole body than necessary, and not enough contact with her body, not enough correspondence and amalgamation—rapid straight strokes, with only the slightest variation or vibration, only a split second’s pause and scarcely any urging at the end of each.

How else can I describe it? Indeed it is foolishness to try. It was as if simply, far up in the mare’s placid wide-open body, there had been put a target which it was the stallion’s game to aim at, and with difficulty to reach, and to strike a few times.

Whereas human intercourse is all rather superficial, that is, near the surface, and it is all rather patient, painstaking; the male as well as the female is patient, on purpose. Human intercourse is a stubborn, clasping and careful stretching and friction verging upon pain; all in detail, a detailed fondling, rubbing, massaging. The human purpose is to feel; the animal, to finish. Human intercourse is a shivering and making the other shiver until at last, verging upon exhaustion, worse comes to worst, which is our felicity. For us there does not seem to be any target; there should be no hurry. Whatever our hurry, it is like wrestling rather than this boxing, jabbing, stabbing.

Meanwhile, I wasted precious instants confusedly thinking of human passion.

Beauboy had his equine way; the dying of his desire and shedding of his sperm started. He did not clench his hoofs upon her flank as we do our fingernails; they hung loosely. He did not try to look at her as we try, amid little syncopes and darknesses, but faced the air over his head in a quite general, lonely fury. There could be only one more stab now. A terribly heavy horse, not a young horse, and generally an idle one, except when this happens; yet he stood almost straight up for it, like a monster bird about to take flight, with invisible wings: Pegasus.

Still, there was no semblance of unification, fusion. Think how human couples become an insoluble knot, irreparable puzzle! Nothing seemed to fit or to be quite fitting. He was still rather behind than upon her, so that it might have been a punishment, a flogging, a clubbing. Or an exploit: it might have been that he wished to lift her off the ground, spitted, for the fun of it.

That was the end. With his disheveled locks shaken above his old eyes of folly, he reminded me of King Lear. That was when it happened, that shudder of a harmless madness, of enough of immortality—who does not know it? It passed all through him, that is, it passed in its liquid form out of him. Whereupon great stallion like mere weak man apparently swooned.

“The wonder is that Sapphire can bear his weight,” I murmured to my sister-in-law.

“It is all she can do. See the pitch of her poor quarters,” she murmured back.

Beauboy’s swoon was the finest thing of all to see. The terrible forelegs clasped her now, not in tenderness but to keep from falling. His head came down on one side, with pale eyes and waxen winded lips; and his flanks drew in and his withers stuck out; thus he stayed for a minute, like a huge shaken question mark. Then suddenly, in the small of his back which was driving his sex home, suddenly softness showed, and it spread upward, up his back and along his crest, and downward, down his legs, until he was apparently all soft and due to fall, but still not falling. This look of weakness impressed me as truly a look of strength, greater than I have ever seen before. The very idea that, when he looked so weak, still he should be able to hold up the ton or more of himself, precariously straining, upon half the feet that the engineering of nature has provided for it, until the end.

Another day, one of our mares was mated with a neighbor’s Arab stallion. Ibn-Nafa is not a young horse, and he is as lean as if he still had to live on the dew and sprigs in his arid fatherland. His limbs are as slender as a Greyhound’s and the torso is extraordinarily cut out around them, in what you might call the equine armpit and equine groin. He holds his head in an intense crook like the hippocampus of Greek mythology. He is startlingly beautiful. A beauty which is all expression and animation: expression very dramatic and movement very rhythmic.

When finally he saw Winona, dark, musing, held by Saltmer, there among the apple trees, he promptly adjusted his mood to what, after all, was expected of him. There was no trail-gate; she had been teased by Beauboy or Guardian before leaving home. Ibn-Nafa went straight toward her as if his master had also assured him of it in so many words: all set, go on, she will not kick. This hoofed Escudero reached his female somewhat at an angle, and mounted so. There was very little toiling or delving, very little piston motion; but on the other hand the easy-seeming ejaculation went on a long time, they lightly swaying together as if in a far-away waltz.

When we got home and put Winona in her stall with her colt Mecca, he too behaved fantastically. He is the prettiest baby-beast on earth, we think: with every muscle as smooth as fruit, every tendon impeccable, and wild-looking crescent ears, and a blaze like an exclamation point. Now he is shedding his infant fuzz; under the golden chestnut of that, the color he will be, a sort of midnight brown, shows in streaks. He’s just two months old. Yet his mother’s return from his father’s embrace meant all the world to him. Having snuffed up and down her tail a while, delighting in their mixed fragrance, he thrust out his infant penis and held it straight and sharp, and so went prancing all around her and, with tosses of his exquisite head, kept looking up at her back as if only their differences in height restrained him from incest. The Arab is a famously amorous horse, more so than the noble Suffolk or coarse Belgian. And I suppose that in general, where sex appears greatest, in ostentatious embodiment or personification, it is not strongest. Idea and ideal and affection are the great hormones.

Roger Gaumond when I first knew him was wonderfully handsome. He had one of those faces reminiscent of a young Roman of the decline and fall, a good-natured Antonine or a grand-bourgeois Antinous. But even then people laughed at him because, for a Parisian, he was huge. He was six feet two or three, with statuesque shoulders, and ideal hands which got in the way, and feet like a pedestal. He had attractive blue eyes in which there was a sparkle of worry, and he was blond with very white skin. I remember that perspiration would appear on his noble forehead if he got into the least emotion or effort, and a good many things made him blush. When I was last in France—in 1938—he had begun to look somewhat gross and sad. His grandeur inclined to be fat, his pallor had turned sallow, and there was something spoiled about his romantic mouth.

He was the sole son and heir of a well-known family of the more or less grand middle class, with money. His father was an industrialist of consequence, and he himself had a good position in a small manufactory on the left bank of the Seine beyond Sevres in which his grandmother and one of his great-aunts had a controlling interest. I think he did not care much about his work except for the remuneration of it. He never complained, he rarely made any reference to it at all. He lived by himself in a pleasant apartment in the Rue Constant, in the aristocratic
arrondissement
of Paris, that is, the seventh. He cared about old furniture, at least to the extent of furnishing his rooms painstakingly and as nobly as he could afford. He also owned a little house outside Paris, at La Miel in the valley of the Chevreuse, where he spent certain months in the spring and summer, driving to work and back in a small but elegant Buick. He enjoyed gardening, priding himself almost boringly upon the special seeds and foreign bulbs which he was able to bring to bloom at La Miel amid his quincunx of apple trees.

He loved music more than all else, particularly Mozart and Wagner, traveling annually to Salzburg and Bayreuth for the
Fest-spiele.
In the past ten years, year after year, he had come home with an unhappy appreciation of the efficacy of the new German state and the might of the modernized German army. Even in 1938 you risked being called pro-Nazi if you prophesied too well in that way; and some of his friends, especially British and Americans, did call him one. He simply said that it was disgusting of them. I think he felt so absolutely part and parcel of his native land that it would not have occurred to him that his patriotism could be doubted, except as a joke, and a joke in bad taste furthermore.

He was an odd inexpressive fellow. He kept the life of his senses a mystery, a mystery to me at least. His life of the spirit seemed all concentrated in a certain cool, habitual, and often grumbling friendliness toward such Americans as Linda Brewer and myself, and certain cousins of his who lived in Versailles, and especially toward a good scholarly fellow named Alain Raffe. Both Roger and Alain Raffe were quite happy young men, I believe; but somehow the expression of displeasure and unhappiness seemed to come more naturally to them than any enthusiasm, and in their general view of life perhaps they never really expected anything very good to last very long.

While I was in Paris that spring of 1938 Roger was summoned to do reserve military service for a fortnight. He had been told that it would be in some portion of the Maginot Line, somewhere between Metz and Sedan. This stirred my curiosity or my imagination, no doubt because I have found the martial architecture of France wonderfully satisfactory to my aesthetic sense, more so in many ways than the ecclesiastical or the residential—especially the works of Vauban, and little Aiguesmortes like a lily with open calyx and pistil and stamens of stone, and that star of masonry lying on the shore at Antibes and great theatrical Pierrefonds. Multiply all that by hundreds of miles, adorn it with the obscurest modern inventions, I imagined, and you would have the Maginot Line. Sometimes indeed I will catch myself daydreaming of France as having something of that kind upon its borders: edifices brooding distantly in the dull landscape of the departments of the East and Northeast, a battlement as permanent as the Pyramids.

Roger, I must say, when he was called up did not seem inspired by any such mental picture. A little tartly he suggested that, for him, the fortnight ahead meant having to work like a dog in a place probably like a cellar; and in fact, in general, for all concerned, national defense must be a matter of working like dogs, not of a taste for austere architecture.

He asked Alain and me to dine with him the night of his departure for those famed bastions. He had to take an early train, so he suggested our coming to the Rue Constant in the late afternoon for a drink and a farewell chat. His apartment was in one wing of what had been in the great past a ducal palace, overlooking a garden. There were platbands in which the spring flowers were green but had not yet begun to blossom; and there was a little lineup of trees under Roger’s window leading back to a fine small rococo pavilion occupied by his landlady, who was a cabinet minister’s widow.

While we drank and chattered we helped Roger into his uniform, which had been sent to his apartment for him to depart in. And when I say we helped, it is not just in a manner of speaking. For it was too small for him by some four or five inches in every dimension. His long and not very muscular forearms as well as his blue-veined wrists and white hands protruded out of the sleeves of the faded blue tunic. Between the tops of the boots and the bottoms of the breeches there were absurd extents of calf over which we had to wind the puttees with the greatest care, securing them with safety pins. Happily, the boots themselves were roomier than the other items, and by leaving them unlaced, resigning himself to certain blisters, he was able to walk well enough, clumpingly. The exiguity of the topcoat did not matter; he would carry it over his arm. The exiguity of the breeches was the real hardship, which could not be helped. They bifurcated him within an inch of his life; and there was real reason to fear a giving-away in the seat or somewhere if he made any sudden motion.

At first all this seemed to amuse Roger, but by the time we had completed him as a military man he had begun to take a dark view. “How sad this is,” he exclaimed, in those tenor tones which they use in France when things go wrong. “How they have made me ridiculous! How idiotic it is!”

Then, sore-footedly and with grotesque precaution, he practiced walking up and down his fine salon. He had furnished it with a variety of old beauty, very fine: black and brass cabinets of the great century—that is, the seventeenth—and a bronze bust and a good gilt clock and ancestral curtains; and it had an ornately inlaid old floor. It was a strange sight, I thought—the huge improvised soldier in the peaceful setting, in his garb of war so poverty-stricken, stricken and cramped, skidding a little on the beautifully waxed wood. It was very funny, though now naturally it does not seem so.

He strode, if in breeches so uneasy it could be called striding, across to one of the tall windows and he gazed into the garden. “It’s sickening! It’s idiotic!” he said again.

Then he remarked that he was ashamed to be caught in this disgraceful typical national plight by an efficient American like myself: limping off to one’s military service, trussed up in someone else’s pants! I reminded him not to be too sure of America’s efficiency. I stood there at the window for a moment gazing into the garden with him. There was a flicker of candles in the great political widow’s windows; she had guests. In the six o’clock light the gravel of the path past Roger’s wing to her door looked like seed pearls. There was a cool breeze coming up as the evening fell, and the short green ribbons of young narcissus waved in the angular flowerbeds along the path. “How pretty it is, don’t you think?” said Roger.