same time, I felt a softness press against my shoulder. Stretching out my hand, I grasped the swelling firmness of a woman's breast. But the petals of a flower garland intruded between my lips and her flesh, a girdle chain between my thigh and her smooth hip, an anklet between my hand and her slender foot. Maddened by the fragile barrier of her ornaments, I crushed her in my embrace. Her body encircled mine like a flowering creeper grips a tree. She made a sound between a sigh and a laugh, her breath moist against my ear. Then a low voice asked, "Why did you not send for me earlier?"
Was I bewitched that night by the moon throwing its feverish light across the bed, gilding her supple body silver as she rode mine? Or was it the long eyes sliding like fish above her slanting Mongol cheekbones? The slender shoulders pulled forward by the weight of her breasts? The perspiration shining on her narrow waist above the mango curve of her hip?
Was it the perfect oval cast by our shadow on the sheets as she pressed her feet against my chest when I enclosed her in my embrace? The sight of her limbs turning the dark blue of a lotus calyx as the clouds obscured the moon? Or was it the heavy plait coiling and uncoiling against our bodies until it unraveled under the billowing curtain of the mosquito net to cocoon us in a second curtain, blacker than the night outside?
I did not know whether I had fashioned her from the night and my own hunger, even though her small teeth pierced my skin again and again like the sudden striking of a snake, and I heard
' the hissing of her pleasure against my throat. But when she left my bed I was already asleep, dreaming I still held a creature half serpent in my arms, my sated senses pulling me into the underground world of my grandfather's legends.
If in the morning the mirror had not reflected the vermilion marks of her painted feet on my chest or the streaks of her black collyrium on my skin I would not have believed she existed. Seeing them, I was sick with love as if I had been pierced by all five arrows of desire.
The next night I lay in my bed, my limbs trembling in anticipation as I waited for her. Yet I was asleep again when her low voice in my ear awoke me, and I was again asleep before she left me.
Knowing the urgency of my desire, I could not understand my inability to stay awake. After the first few nights I realized I was enchanted.
What can I tell you of the months that followed? I was intoxicated by a pleasure that left me both satisfied and delicately unsatisfied. I never saw her by daylight, and if I had I would not have recognized her. At some point in our lovemaking she had revealed her name was Rima, yet I did not search for her among the tribal women bending over the tea bushes, fearful that the brilliant sun might rob me of my enchantment.
My body knew the contours of her body, my hands the features of her face, but to my eyes she was an endless play of shadows, entering my bed in darkness when I was no longer capable of waiting for her so that always she surprised my senses.
She even knew when when our passion was in danger of becoming repetition. Then she seduced me with tribal songs in a language I could not understand so that I heard only the sweetness of the melodies. She told me tales of a great serpent kingdom lying inches beneath the soil. She spoke to me of charms that gave men the strength of elephants in rut and of magic performed during the eclipse of the moon when a man's soul could be captured inside the two halves of a coconut.
She swore she had seen an old woman raise flames from the palms of her hands, and a tribal priest cover a mango seedling with his shawl, then pull it away to reveal a dwarf tree bending under the weight of ripe mangoes. Swarming like clusters of black bees in the whiteness of her eyes, her pupils mesmerized me as her low voice gave substance to the worlds I had dreamed of when reading my grandfather's books.
Once again I took pleasure
Was I bewitched that night by the moon throwing its feverish light across the bed, gilding her supple body silver as she rode mine? Or was it the long eyes sliding like fish above her slanting Mongol cheekbones? The slender shoulders pulled forward by the weight of her breasts? The perspiration shining on her narrow waist above the mango curve of her hip?
Was it the perfect oval cast by our shadow on the sheets as she pressed her feet against my chest when I enclosed her in my embrace? The sight of her limbs turning the dark blue of a lotus calyx as the clouds obscured the moon? Or was it the heavy plait coiling and uncoiling against our bodies until it unraveled under the billowing curtain of the mosquito net to cocoon us in a second curtain, blacker than the night outside?
I did not know whether I had fashioned her from the night and my own hunger, even though her small teeth pierced my skin again and again like the sudden striking of a snake, and I heard
' the hissing of her pleasure against my throat. But when she left my bed I was already asleep, dreaming I still held a creature half serpent in my arms, my sated senses pulling me into the underground world of my grandfather's legends.
If in the morning the mirror had not reflected the vermilion marks of her painted feet on my chest or the streaks of her black collyrium on my skin I would not have believed she existed. Seeing them, I was sick with love as if I had been pierced by all five arrows of desire.
The next night I lay in my bed, my limbs trembling in anticipation as I waited for her. Yet I was asleep again when her low voice in my ear awoke me, and I was again asleep before she left me.
Knowing the urgency of my desire, I could not understand my inability to stay awake. After the first few nights I realized I was enchanted.
What can I tell you of the months that followed? I was intoxicated by a pleasure that left me both satisfied and delicately unsatisfied. I never saw her by daylight, and if I had I would not have recognized her. At some point in our lovemaking she had revealed her name was Rima, yet I did not search for her among the tribal women bending over the tea bushes, fearful that the brilliant sun might rob me of my enchantment.
My body knew the contours of her body, my hands the features of her face, but to my eyes she was an endless play of shadows, entering my bed in darkness when I was no longer capable of waiting for her so that always she surprised my senses.
She even knew when when our passion was in danger of becoming repetition. Then she seduced me with tribal songs in a language I could not understand so that I heard only the sweetness of the melodies. She told me tales of a great serpent kingdom lying inches beneath the soil. She spoke to me of charms that gave men the strength of elephants in rut and of magic performed during the eclipse of the moon when a man's soul could be captured inside the two halves of a coconut.
She swore she had seen an old woman raise flames from the palms of her hands, and a tribal priest cover a mango seedling with his shawl, then pull it away to reveal a dwarf tree bending under the weight of ripe mangoes. Swarming like clusters of black bees in the whiteness of her eyes, her pupils mesmerized me as her low voice gave substance to the worlds I had dreamed of when reading my grandfather's books.
Once again I took pleasure
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