The Naughty Bits (21 page)

And thus these riddles, composed in Anglo-Saxon in a still somewhat barbarous England (mid-eleventh century), have two answers each. The church-safe interpretations are given at the end; the other possibilities are left to you. Just don’t tell the pope.

Riddle 44

A peculiar thing hangs by a man’s thigh,
Free beneath the folds. The front is pierced.
It is stiff and hard, quite well-placed.
When a young man raises his cloak
Over his knee, he greets with the head
A familiar hole
That he has frequently filled before
Of the same length
As what dangles there.

Riddle 37

I saw a thing. The belly was behind,
Greatly swollen. Its master, a mighty man, attended to it,
And it had accomplished much
When that which filled it flew through its eye.
It does not continuously die when it has to give
What’s within to another, for the treasure returns
To its belly, and the prize is raised.
It produces a son. It is the father of itself.

Riddle 80

I am a man’s comrade, a warrior’s companion,
Friend to my beloved, a king’s retainer.
His blonde woman, an earl’s daughter, though she be noble,
Sometimes lays her hand on me.
At times, I have in my stomach what grew in the grove.
Often I ride on a stately steed, at the edge of the grove.
Firm is my tongue. Often I give the poet a reward
When he has sung. Good is my thing
And I myself am sallow. Say what I am called.

Answers:
a key, a bellows, a horn

—translated by Andrew Cole

from
“Elena”

ANAÏS NIN

Anaïs Nin never wanted to be an erotica writer. Her diaries indicate quite clearly that she thought erotica was a male-dominated genre in which a woman’s sense of the texture and nuance of sexuality could never be expressed. When a “collector” of erotic books commissioned first her friend Henry Miller and later Nin to write for a dollar a page, she was defiant: the “poetry” of sex would be lost if she was to write sex on command. Yet eventually she decided to try, and the results would later be published together under the title
Delta of Venus.
And though Nin felt that her diaries were her true explorations into sex as a woman, she eventually conceded that her voice also emerged in her erotica, despite the conventions of the genre.

Now, a half century later, the situation is rather different. Erotica is no longer a male stronghold, and much of the femininity that Nin was at pains to express has become the stuff of erotic cliché. Reading Nin is like reading a primer in the genre, though a very good one at that. Nin’s project was to inject humanity into writings on sex; contemporary erotica should try to pick up where she left off.

When she was about to come and could no longer defend herself against her pleasure, Leila stopped kissing her, leaving Bijou halfway on the peak of an excruciating sensation, half-crazed. Elena had stopped at the same moment.

Uncontrollable now, like some magnificent maniac, Bijou threw herself over Elena’s body, parted her legs, placed herself between them, glued her sex to Elena’s, and moved, moved with desperation. Like a man now, she thumped against Elena, to fell the two sexes meeting, soldering. Then as she felt her pleasure coming she stopped herself, to prolong it, fell backwards and opened her mouth to Leila’s breast, to burning nipples that were seeking to be caressed.

Elena was now also in the frenzy before orgasm. She felt a hand under her, a hand she could rub against. She wanted to throw herself on this hand until it made her come, but she also wanted to prolong her pleasure. And she ceased moving. The hand pursued her. She stood up, and the hand again traveled towards her sex . . . Leila’s pointed nails buried in the softest part of Elena’s shoulder, between her breast and her underarm, hurting, a delicious pain, the tigress taking hold of her, mangling her. Elena’s body so burning hot that she feared one more touch would set off the explosion . . .

Elena and Leila together attacked Bijou, intent on drawing from her the ultimate sensation. Bijou was surrounded, enveloped, covered, licked, kissed, bitten, rolled again on the fur rug, tormented with a million hands and tongues. She was begging now to be satisfied, spread her legs, sought to satisfy herself by friction against the other’s bodies. They would not let her. With tongues and fingers they pried into her, back and front, sometimes stopping to touch each other’s tongue . . . Bijou raised herself to receive a kiss that would end her suspense . . . She almost cried to have it end.

from
The Satyricon

PETRONIUS

Classicists and Fellini fans will already be familiar with Petronius’s first-century chronicle of the decadence of Nero’s Roman Empire, the great
Satyricon.
I was never a big fan of Fellini’s film adaptation; it’s dark and vulgar and lacks the mischief that a Pasolini would have given it. In fact,
The Satyricon
would have been a perfect Pasolini springboard: bawdy, sardonic, and class-conscious, recounting the adventures of Encolpius, a wayward thief, as he is passed from one set of probing, poking aristocratic fingers (both male and female) to another. Along the way our poor hero (whose name means “embraced”) gets assaulted by a sex-crazed hag, continually loses his boy lover Giton to a variety of competitors, manages to offend Priapus (the god of erections) who then punishes him with chronic technical difficulties, and finally goes to be “cured” by another old hag who rams a leather dildo “rubbed with oil, ground pepper and crushed nettle seed” up his anus. There’s a cure for impotence!

So as you can probably tell,
The Satyricon
makes a damn good read. The only problem is that four-fifths of the original text is lost, and often you’ll be set up for a really naughty bit only for the narrative to break off and start again in a different place. Talk about a tease! But the parts that remain not only chronicle the indulgence and excess that marked the declining phase of the Roman Empire but create a literary precedent for my favorite satyric and ribald tales of the Middle Ages. Without Petronius, there might have been no Boccaccio, no Chaucer, no Rabelais. With this in mind, I chose a particularly Boccaccian excerpt that details a trick for getting what you want from a reluctant lover.

“When I went to Asia . . . I lodged in a house at Pergamus, which I found very much to my taste, not only on account of the neatness of the apartments, but still more for the great beauty of my host’s son; and this was the method I devised that I might not be suspected by the father as a seducer. Whenever any mention happened to be made at table of the abuse of handsome boys, I affected such keen indignation, I protested with such an air of austere morality against the violence done to my ears by such obscene discourse, that the mother especially looked upon me as one of the seven sages. Already then I began to conduct the youth to the gymnasium; it was I who had the regulation of his studies, who acted as his monitor, and took care above all that no one should enter the house who might debauch him.

“It happened once that we lay down to sleep in the dining room (for it was a holiday; the school had closed early; and our prolonged festivity had made us too lazy to retire to our chamber). About midnight I perceived that my pupil was awake, so with a timid voice I murmured this prayer: ‘O sovereign Venus, if I may steal a kiss from this boy, and he not know it, I will make him a present tomorrow of a pair of turtle doves.’

“Hearing the price offered for the favor, he began to snore, and I, approaching the pretended sleeper, stole two or three kisses. Content with this beginning, I rose early in the morning, brought him, as he expected, a choice pair of doves, and so acquitted myself of my vow.

“The next night, finding the same opportunity, I changed my petition: ‘If I may pass my wanton hand over this boy,’ I said, ‘and he not perceive it, I will give him for his silence a pair of most pugnacious fighting cocks.’ At this promise the lad moved toward me of his own accord, and was afraid, I verily believe, lest he should find me asleep. I quieted his uneasiness on that score, and moved my hands over his entire body with all the desire that drove me. Then when daylight came, I made him happy with what I had promised him.

“The third night, being again free to venture, I leaned over his wakeful ear and said: ‘Immortal gods, if, while he is sleeping, I should be able to make the fullest and best love to him, in return I will tomorrow give the boy a fine horse, a cross between the Asturian and the Macedonian breed—so long as he never wakes.’ Never had the lad slept more soundly. First I took his lovely chest fully in my hands, then I breathed kisses from his mouth, and finally all my longings were brought to one climax. Next morning he remained sitting in his room, expecting my present as usual. It is much easier, you know, to buy turtle doves and fighting cocks than an Asturian horse, and besides, I was afraid lest so considerable a present should render the motives of my liberality suspected. So after walking about for some hours, I returned to my lodgings, and gave the boy nothing but a kiss. He looked about him on all sides, then throwing his arms round my neck said, ‘I say, master, where is the Asturian?’”

—adapted by Jack Murnighan from a
nineteenth-century translation

from
The Name of the Rose

UMBERTO ECO

Not long ago, I got to meet Umberto Eco. I had waited a long time for the opportunity, but it proved to be a rather anticlimactic affair. Television cameras were descending on him, and, before he was mobbed, I only managed to get out one sentence: “Fredric Jameson says hello.” His response: “Oh, really.” I had wanted to say so much more, to blurt out, “Caro Umberto, we’ve lived parallel lives. I’m a semiotician and a medievalist too! And now we’re both writers!” But there are two types of writers in the world: those that television cameramen mob and those that television cameramen shove out of the way.

Although I started reading Eco in college, it wasn’t until graduate school that meeting him became a possibility. One day when I was in Jameson’s office (he was my thesis adviser) discussing—what else— medieval literature and semiotics, he asked me “Do you know Eco?” I said, “Sure, I’ve read almost all his books.” But Jameson meant did I know him personally, had we met. No, we hadn’t. “Oh, but you must. We used to vacation together. When you go back to Italy, you should pay him a visit.”

I did go back to Italy but was always too afraid to look Eco up. The conventional thought is that we all want to befriend or date or reproduce versions of ourselves and are drawn to them like Narcissus to his own image. I’m not so sure this is the case. Perhaps the truly similar allow us to see ourselves in a way that Narcissus was never able to—he didn’t realize he was looking at his own image—whereas with the doppelgänger, you are aware of what it is—a mirroring of yourself, open to your view. I was afraid to meet Eco perhaps because I feared how I would see myself in his eyes. He would truly be a jury of my peers, and it wasn’t clear that I’d live up. Was my Italian good enough, my Latin? Had I read enough books? In my everyday life, these things don’t come up; with Eco, I knew I would be in the audience of someone who had done the same things as I had in life and who had probably done them better. The doppelgänger scared off Narcissus.

I can take some comfort that, at last report, Eco wasn’t editing a magazine like
Nerve.
Perhaps I’ve got him there. But he does write a damn good sex scene, as in the following excerpt from
The Name of the Rose.
I just hope he doesn’t apply for my job.

Saint Michael Archangel protect me, because for the edification of future readers and the flaying of my guilt I want now to tell how a young man can succumb to the snares of the Devil, that they may be known and evident, so anyone encountering them in the future may defeat them.

So, it was a woman. Or, rather, a girl. Having had until then (and since then, God be thanked) little intimacy with creatures of that sex, I cannot say what her age may have been. I know she was young, almost adolescent, perhaps she had past sixteen or eighteen springs, or perhaps twenty . . .

I knew her vernacular very slightly; it was different from the bit I had learned in Pisa, but I realized from her tone that she was saying sweet words to me, and she seemed to be saying something like “You are young, you are handsome . . .” It is rare for a novice who has spent his whole life in a monastery to hear declarations of his beauty; indeed we are regularly admonished that physical beauty is fleeting and must be considered base . . . The girl, in saying this, had extended her hand until the tips of her fingers grazed my cheek, then quite beardless. I felt a kind of delirium, but at that moment I was unable to sense any hint of sin in my heart.

Suddenly the girl appeared to me as the black but comely virgin of whom the Song of Songs speaks. She wore a threadbare little dress of rough cloth that opened in a fairly immodest fashion over her bosom, and around her neck was a necklace made of little colored stones, very commonplace, I believe.

Then the creature came still closer to me . . . and she raised her hand to stroke my face, and repeated the words I had already heard. And while I did not know whether to flee from her or move even closer, while my head was throbbing as if the trumpets of Joshua were about to bring down the walls of Jericho, as I yearned and at once feared to touch her, she smiled with great joy, emitted the stifled moan of a pleased she-goat, and undid the strings that closed her dress over her bosom, slipped the dress from her body like a tunic, and stood before me as Eve must have appeared to Adam in the garden of Eden . . . whether what I felt was a snare of the Enemy or a gift of heaven, I was now powerless against the impulse that moved me . . . I was in her arms, and we fell together onto the bare floor of the kitchen, and whether on my own initiative or through her wiles, I found myself free of my novice’s habit and we felt no shame at our bodies and cuncta erant bona . . .