In Bed
For a few moments in the room we seemed to be two strangers
observed by somebody, and that somebody was always her and me, the two had to watch what
I was doing and not what she was doing, so I sat on the edge of the bed and calmly
started taking off my shoes and socks, holding my bare feet in my hands and feeling how
lovely and moist they were, as if pulled out of the earth that very minute, and then I,
with fixed purpose, started to walk around, feigning little reasons for my movements,
letting the hems of my trouser-legs brush the floor, at the same time as they partially
covered my feet, lending them mystery, knowing that they, bare and very white,
powerfully embodied my coming nakedness, and soon I heard her breathing in deeply, over
by the chair, where she had perhaps already given in to her desperation, struggling to
take off her clothes, getting her fingers caught in the strap slipping down her arm, and
I, still faking, knew that all of that was real, oh how I knew her nightmarish obsession
for feet, and for my feet in particular, their firm step and well-shaped form, a little
bony around the toes perhaps and nervously marked with veins and tendons on the instep,
though they hadn’t lost the shy manner of a tender root, and I went to and fro
with my calculated steps, lengthening the wait more and more with minimal pretexts, but
as soon as she left the room and went briefly to the bathroom, I quickly took off my
trousers and shirt and throwing myself onto thebed, I waited for her,
stiff and ready, enjoying in silence the cotton of the sheet that covered me, and right
then I closed my eyes thinking of the stratagems I would use (of all the many I knew),
and in this way I went over alone in my head the things that we did, how she quivered at
the first twitches of my mouth and at the shine I forged in my eyes, where I brought
into plain view what was most vile and sordid in me, knowing that carried away by my
other side she would always shout ‘so this is the bastard I love’, and I
went over in my head that other trifling move in our game, a preamble nonetheless to
unexpected later twists and turns, just as necessary a start as pushing a simple pawn up
the board, in which I closed my hand over hers and straightened out her fingers,
instilling courage in them, guiding them under my control to the hair on my chest, until
they, from the example of my fingers under the sheet, developed their own masterful
clandestine activities, or at a more advanced stage, after having carefully pored over
our hairs, swellings and many smells, when the two of us on our knees measured the
longest path for a single kiss, the palms of our hands pressed together, our arms open
in an almost Christian exercise, our teeth biting each other’s mouths as if biting
into the soft flesh of the heart, our eyes closed and our imaginations surrendered to
the curves of our circlings, I also saw myself involved in certain practices, such as
when, in a trance and already haughtily raised above the saddle of her stomach, I would
prematurely fulfil one of her (of my) strangest whims, shooting sudden violent jets of
milky birdlime which stuck to the skin of her face and the skin of her breasts, or such
as that other, less impulsive one, slower to ripen, its fruit developing in a silent and
patient crescendo of firm contractions, in which, me inside her, without our moving,
with exasperated cries we reached those death-rattles of the height of exaltation, and I
thought about the dangerous backwards leap, when she on her stomach would generously
offer meanother pasture, and in which my arms and hands symmetrically
and almost mechanically gripped her below the shoulders, pressing and adjusting, part by
part, our anointed bodies, and all the time I was thinking of my hands, and the broad
backs of them, they were much used in this passionate geometry, so well devised by me,
and which invariably led her to say in her perdition ‘magnificent,
For a few moments in the room we seemed to be two strangers
observed by somebody, and that somebody was always her and me, the two had to watch what
I was doing and not what she was doing, so I sat on the edge of the bed and calmly
started taking off my shoes and socks, holding my bare feet in my hands and feeling how
lovely and moist they were, as if pulled out of the earth that very minute, and then I,
with fixed purpose, started to walk around, feigning little reasons for my movements,
letting the hems of my trouser-legs brush the floor, at the same time as they partially
covered my feet, lending them mystery, knowing that they, bare and very white,
powerfully embodied my coming nakedness, and soon I heard her breathing in deeply, over
by the chair, where she had perhaps already given in to her desperation, struggling to
take off her clothes, getting her fingers caught in the strap slipping down her arm, and
I, still faking, knew that all of that was real, oh how I knew her nightmarish obsession
for feet, and for my feet in particular, their firm step and well-shaped form, a little
bony around the toes perhaps and nervously marked with veins and tendons on the instep,
though they hadn’t lost the shy manner of a tender root, and I went to and fro
with my calculated steps, lengthening the wait more and more with minimal pretexts, but
as soon as she left the room and went briefly to the bathroom, I quickly took off my
trousers and shirt and throwing myself onto thebed, I waited for her,
stiff and ready, enjoying in silence the cotton of the sheet that covered me, and right
then I closed my eyes thinking of the stratagems I would use (of all the many I knew),
and in this way I went over alone in my head the things that we did, how she quivered at
the first twitches of my mouth and at the shine I forged in my eyes, where I brought
into plain view what was most vile and sordid in me, knowing that carried away by my
other side she would always shout ‘so this is the bastard I love’, and I
went over in my head that other trifling move in our game, a preamble nonetheless to
unexpected later twists and turns, just as necessary a start as pushing a simple pawn up
the board, in which I closed my hand over hers and straightened out her fingers,
instilling courage in them, guiding them under my control to the hair on my chest, until
they, from the example of my fingers under the sheet, developed their own masterful
clandestine activities, or at a more advanced stage, after having carefully pored over
our hairs, swellings and many smells, when the two of us on our knees measured the
longest path for a single kiss, the palms of our hands pressed together, our arms open
in an almost Christian exercise, our teeth biting each other’s mouths as if biting
into the soft flesh of the heart, our eyes closed and our imaginations surrendered to
the curves of our circlings, I also saw myself involved in certain practices, such as
when, in a trance and already haughtily raised above the saddle of her stomach, I would
prematurely fulfil one of her (of my) strangest whims, shooting sudden violent jets of
milky birdlime which stuck to the skin of her face and the skin of her breasts, or such
as that other, less impulsive one, slower to ripen, its fruit developing in a silent and
patient crescendo of firm contractions, in which, me inside her, without our moving,
with exasperated cries we reached those death-rattles of the height of exaltation, and I
thought about the dangerous backwards leap, when she on her stomach would generously
offer meanother pasture, and in which my arms and hands symmetrically
and almost mechanically gripped her below the shoulders, pressing and adjusting, part by
part, our anointed bodies, and all the time I was thinking of my hands, and the broad
backs of them, they were much used in this passionate geometry, so well devised by me,
and which invariably led her to say in her perdition ‘magnificent,
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