My suffering increased every day, and she—she merely smiled.
Today, for no apparent reason, she suddenly said, “You interest me. Most men are so ordinary, with no élan, no poetry, but you have a certain depth and enthusiasm, above all an earnestness that pleases me. I could grow fond of you.”
After a brief but intense storm, we walked over to the meadow and the Venus statue. The soil was steaming all around, mists rising into the sky like fumes from a sacrifice, a shredded rainbow floating in the air, trees still dripping, but sparrows and finches were already flitting from branch to branch, twittering pertly as if supremely delighted about something, and everything was imbued with a fresh scent. We couldn’t walk across the meadow, for it was still soaked, glowing in the sun like a small pond, with the Goddess of Love rising from its rippling surface. Around her head a swarm of gnats was dancing, radiant in the sun and hovering over her like an aureole.
Wanda enjoyed the charming scene, and since there were still puddles on the benches along the path, she leaned on my arm in order to rest a bit. She was suffused with a sweet fatigue, her eyes half-shut, her breath grazing my cheek.
I took hold of her hand and—I truly don’t know how I managed—I asked her:
“Could you love me, Madam?”
“Why not?” she replied, and her calm, sunny gaze alighted on me, but not for long.
A moment later, I knelt before her, pressing my flaming face into the airy muslin of her robe.
“Why, Severin!” she cried. “This is indecent!”
But I seized her small foot and pressed my lips upon it.
“You’re getting more and more indecent!” she cried, freeing herself and striding quickly toward the house while her darling slipper remained in my hand.
Was that an omen?
The whole next day, I did not dare approach her. Toward evening, when I was sitting in my gazebo, her piquant little head with its red hair suddenly emerged through the green garlands of her balcony. “Why don’t you come up?” she impatiently called down to me.
I scurried up the stairs, but once there I again lost heart and I tapped very softly. Instead of saying “Come in,” she opened the door and stood on the threshold.
“Where is my slipper?”
“It is—I have—I want—” I stuttered.
“Get it, and then we’ll have tea and we’ll chat.”
When I returned, she was busy with the samovar. I solemnly placed the slipper on the table and stood in the corner like a child awaiting its punishment.
I noticed that her forehead was slightly contracted, and there was something rigorous, domineering about her mouth—something that fascinated me.
All at once she burst out laughing.
“So—you’re really in love—with me?”
“Yes, and I’m suffering more than you think.”
“You’re suffering?” She laughed again.
I was indignant, embarrassed, destroyed, but it was all quite useless.
“Why?” she went on. “I’m fond of you, very fond of you.” She gave me her hand and beamed at me in an exceedingly friendly way.
“And you want to be my wife?”
Wanda gave me a look—yes, what kind of look? A look, I believe, mainly of astonishment and with a trace of scorn.
“Where did you suddenly muster all this courage?” she said.
“Courage?”
“Yes, particularly the courage to take a wife, and especially me?” She raised the slipper aloft. “Have you made friends with it so quickly?” she said, alluding to our German expression for a henpecked husband: “Pantoffelheld,” “slipper hero.”
“But joking aside: Do you really want to marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Severin, this is serious business. I believe that you love me, and I love you too, and, even more important, we interest one another. There is no danger of our getting bored all that soon. But you know I’m a frivolous woman, and that is precisely why I take marriage very seriously; and if I assume obligations, I want to be able to abide by them. But I’m afraid—no—you’re sure to be hurt.”
“I beg you, be honest with me,” I countered.
“Well, to be honest: I don’t believe I can love a man longer than …” She tilted her little head gracefully to one side and pondered.
“One year,” I said.
“You must be joking! A month perhaps.”
“With me, too?”
“Well, with you—two perhaps.”
“Two months!” I screamed.
“Two months—that’s a very long time.”
“Madam, that’s more than in Antiquity.”
“You see? You can’t stand the truth.”
Wanda walked through the room, then leaned against the fireplace and gazed at me, her arm resting on the mantelpiece.
“What am I going to do with you?”
“Whatever you like,” I answered, resigned, “whatever gives you pleasure.”
“How inconsistent!” she cried. “First you want me as your wife and now you give yourself to me as a toy.”
“Wanda—I love you.”
“Then we’re back where we started. You love me and want me as your wife. But I don’t care to remarry, because I doubt that my and your feelings will be permanent.”
“What if I want to take the chance?” I rejoined.
“Then it all depends on whether I want to take the chance with you,” she murmured. “I can well imagine belonging to one man for life, but it would have to be a total man, a man who commands my respect, who subjugates me with the power of who and what he is—do you understand? And every man—I know this—turns weak, pliant, ridiculous as soon as he’s in love. He puts himself in the woman’s hands, kneels before her—whereas I can love only the man before whom I would kneel. But I’ve grown so fond of you that I want to try it with you.”
I plunged to her feet.
“My goodness! You’re already kneeling,” she taunted me. “That’s a good start.” And when I stood up again, she continued: “I’ll give you a year to win me over, to convince me that we are suited to each other, that we can live together. If you succeed, I’ll be your wife, Severin—a wife who will perform her duties rigorously and conscientiously. During this year we will live as if in a marriage—”
The blood rushed to my head.
Her eyes likewise suddenly blazed up. “We will live together,” she went on, “share all our habits, in order to see whether we can find ourselves in one another. I grant you all the rights of a husband, an admirer, a friend! Are you satisfied with that?
“I have to be, I guess.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“Then I want to—”
“Excellent. That’s the way a man speaks. Here is my hand.”
For ten days I was never away from her for even an hour, except at night. I could constantly look into her eyes, hold her hands, listen to her speak, accompany her everywhere. My love was like a profound, a bottomless abyss, into which I kept sinking deeper and deeper, from which nothing could save me.
We spent an afternoon on the meadow, at the feet of the Venus statue. I was picking flowers and tossing them into Wanda’s lap, and she was binding them into wreaths for adorning our Goddess.
Suddenly Wanda gave me such a peculiar, bewildering look that my passion blazed over my head like flames. Losing control of myself, I threw my arms around her and clung to her lips and she—she pressed me against her heaving bosom.
“Are you angry,” I then asked her.
“I never get angry at anything that is natural,” she replied. “I’m just worried that you’re suffering.”
“Oh, I’m suffering terribly.”
“Poor friend.” She brushed the tangled hair from my forehead. “Not because of me, I hope.”
“No—” I answered. “And yet my love for you has turned into a kind of madness. I’m tormented day and night by the thought that I can lose you, perhaps should lose you
.”
“But you don’t even possess me as yet,” said Wanda, with those same moist, quivering, consuming eyes that had already once swept me away. Then she stood up, and her small, translucent hands placed a wreath of blue anemones on the white curly hair of Venus. Half reluctantly I put my arm around Wanda’s waist.
“I can’t live without you anymore, you beautiful woman,” I said. “Believe me, just this once believe me. It’s no claptrap, no fantasy. I feel deep in my innermost core that my life is tied to yours. If you leave me, I’ll perish, I’ll wither away.”
“That won’t be necessary, for I love you.” She took hold of my chin. “Silly!”
“But you’re willing to be mine only under certain conditions, while I belong to you unconditionally—”
“That’s not wise, Severin,” she replied, almost startled. “Don’t you know me yet, don’t you even want to know me? I am good if I am treated earnestly and reasonably. But if one submits to me too deeply, then I become arrogant—”
“Then be that! Be arrogant, be despotic,” I cried in utter exaltation, “only be mine, be mine forever.” I lay at her feet, with my arms around her knees.
“This won’t end well, my friend,” she said earnestly, without stirring.
“Oh, but it should never end!” I cried excitedly, intensely. “Only death should separate us. If you can’t be mine, all mine and forever, then I want to be your slave, serve you, tolerate anything from you—only just don’t push me away.”
“Pull yourself together,” she said, leaning over and kissing my forehead. “I’m very fond of you, but that’s not the way to conquer me, to hold on to me.”
“I’m willing to do anything, anything you like—I just don’t want to lose you,” I cried. “Just not that—I can’t stand the thought of it!”
“Stand up.”
I obeyed.
“You are truly a strange person,” Wanda went on. “So you want to possess me at any price?
“Yes, at any price.”
“But what good would it do you to possess me—?” she mused—there was something lurking, something sinister in her eyes—“if I stopped loving you, if I belonged to someone else?”
Cold shivers ran down my spine. I looked at her: she stood before me, so solid and self-assured, and her eyes had a cold glint.
“You see,” she said. “You are terrified at the very thought.” Suddenly her face beamed with a charming smile.
“Yes, I’m horrified when I vividly imagine that a woman whom I love, who has requited my love, could give herself to another man without showing me the slightest compassion. But do I have a choice? If I love that woman, love her madly, should I proudly turn my back on her and let my boastful strength destroy me? Should I blow my brains out? I have two female ideals. If I can’t find my noble, sunny ideal, a kind and faithful woman to share my life, then I won’t put up with anything halfway, anything lukewarm! I would rather submit to a woman with no virtue, no fidelity, no compassion. Such a woman in her selfish grandeur is also an ideal. If I can’t enjoy the full and total happiness of love, then I want to drain its torments, its tortures to the dregs; then I want the woman I love to mistreat me, betray me, and the more cruelly the better. That too is a pleasure.”
“Are you insane?” cried Wanda.
“I love you with all my soul,” I continued, “with all my senses, and so deeply that your nearness, your atmosphere are indispensable to me if I am to go on living. So choose between my ideals, Madam. Make of me what you will, your husband or your slave.”
“Very good,” said Wanda, knitting her small but vividly curving eyebrows. “I find this highly amusing: to utterly control a man who interests me, who loves me. At least I won’t lack for entertainment. You were imprudent enough to leave the choice up to me. This is my choice: I want you to be my slave! I am going to turn you into my plaything!”
“Oh! Do that!” I cried, half quaking, half delighted. “If a marriage can be based only on equality, on compatibility, then the greatest passions, by contrast, arise from opposites. We are such opposites, almost hostile to each other. That explains this love of mine, which is part hatred, part fear. In such a relationship, only one person can be the hammer, the other the anvil. I want to be the anvil. I can’t be happy if I look down on my beloved. I want to be able to worship a woman, and I can do so only if she is cruel to me.”
“But, Severin,” Wanda retorted almost angrily, “do you think I’m capable of mistreating a man who loves me as much as you do and whom I love?”
“Why not, if that makes me worship you all the more? We can truly love only what stands above us, a woman who subjugates us through beauty, temperament, intellect, willpower, a woman who becomes our despot.”
“So you are attracted to what other people are repulsed by?”
“That’s it. That’s what’s so bizarre about me.”
“Well, ultimately there is nothing so distinctive or singular about all your passions, for who doesn’t like a beautiful fur, and everyone knows and feels the close kinship between voluptuousness and cruelty.”
“But with me, all this is intensified to the highest degree,” I replied.
“That means rationality has little power over you, and you are soft, yielding, and sensual by nature.”
“Were the martyrs also soft and sensual by nature?”
“The martyrs?”
“Quite the contrary: They were suprasensual people, who found joy in suffering, who sought the most dreadful agonies, even death, the way others seek pleasure. And that is the kind of person that I am, Madam: suprasensual.”
“Just make sure you don’t become a martyr out of love, a martyr to a woman.“
We were sitting on Wanda’s small balcony in the warm, fragrant summer night, a twofold roof above us: first the green ceiling of vines, then the canopy of the sky, which was sown with countless stars. From the park came a soft and plaintive caterwauling, and I was perched on a footstool at the feet of my Goddess, talking about my childhood.
“And by then all these singular tendencies had already crystallized in you?” asked Wanda.
“Yes indeed. I can’t remember ever not having them. Even in my cradle, as my mother subsequently told me, I was suprasensual. I rejected the healthy breasts of the wet nurse, and they had to feed me goat’s milk. When I was a little boy, I had an enigmatic fear of women, but that was actually an intense interest in them. I was frightened by the gray vault, the penumbra of a church, and I panicked before the glittering altars and images of saints. On the other hand, I would secretly steal over—as if to a forbidden joy—to a plaster Venus that stood in my father’s small library. I would kneel down and recite to her the prayers that had been inculcated in me, the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Credo.
“One night I left my bed in order to visit her. The sickle moon illuminated the way and shed a cold, wan, blue light on the Goddess. I threw myself down before her and kissed her cold feet as I had seen our farmers do when they kissed the feet of the dead Savior.
“I was seized with an uncontrollable yearning.
“I rose and embraced the beautiful cold body and kissed the cold lips. Now I was overcome by a profound terror and I fled. And in my dreams the Goddess stood in front of my bed and threatened me with her raised arm.
“I was sent to school at an early age, and so I shortly began Gymnasium, where I passionately seized upon everything that the ancient world promised to reveal to me. I was soon more familiar with the gods of Greece than with the religion of Jesus. Together with Paris I gave Venus the fateful apple, I saw Troy burn, and I followed Odysseus on his wanderings. The primal images of all beautiful things sank deep into my soul, and so at a time when other boys act crude and obscene, I displayed an insuperable abhorrence for all that was vile, common, and unsightly.
“And the thing that struck the maturing adolescent as particularly vile and unsightly was the love for women as it was first shown to him in its full vulgarity. I avoided
any contact with the fair sex—in short, I was insanely suprasensual.
“When I was about fourteen, my mother hired a charming chambermaid, young, pretty, with a curvaceous figure. One day, while I was studying my Tacitus and enthusing about the virtues of the ancient Germanic tribes, the maid was sweeping my room. Suddenly she stopped, leaned toward me, broom in hand, and two full, fresh, delicious lips touched mine. The kiss of the amorous little cat sent shivers up and down my spine, but I brandished my Germania like a shield against the seductress and indignantly stormed out of the room.”
Wanda burst into loud laughter. “You are truly one of a kind, but do go on.”
“Another episode from that period is unforgettable,” I continued. “Countess Sobol, a distant aunt of mine, was visiting my parents. She was a beautiful, majestic woman with a charming smile; but I hated her, for the family regarded her as a Messalina, and my behavior toward her was as bad, nasty, and awkward as could be.
“One day my parents went to the district seat. My aunt decided to make use of their absence and take me to task. Unexpectedly she entered in her fur-lined kazabaika, followed by the cook, the kitchen maid, and the little cat that I had spurned. Wasting no time, they grabbed me and, overcoming my violent resistance, they bound me hand and foot. Next, with a wicked smile my aunt rolled up her sleeves and began laying into me with a heavy switch. She hit me so hard that she drew blood, and for all my heroic valor I finally screamed and wept and begged for mercy. She then had me untied, but I was forced to kneel down, thank her for the punishment, and kiss her hand.
“Now just look at the suprasensual fool! The switch held by the beautiful, voluptuous woman, who looked like an angry monarch in her fur jacket, first aroused my desire for women, and from then on my aunt seemed like the most attractive woman on God’s earth.
“My Catonian severity, my timidity with women, were simply nothing but the most sublime sense of beauty; sensuality now became a sort of culture in my imagination, and I swore not to squander its holy sensations on an ordinary creature but to save them for an ideal woman—if possible, the Goddess of Love herself.