As usual, once I was on the stairs I began to sympathize with her reasons, or so it seemed to me: she was isolated in the new neighborhood, shut up in her modern house, beaten by Stefano, engaged in some mysterious struggle with her own body in order not to conceive children, envious of my success in school to the point of indicating to me with that crazy bet that she would like to study again. Besides, it was likely that she saw me as much freer than she was. The breakup with Antonio, my troubles with school seemed like nonsense compared to hers. Step by step, without realizing it, I felt driven to a grudging support, then renewed admiration. Yes, it would be wonderful if she started studying again. To return to the time of elementary school, when she was always first and I second. To give meaning back to studying because she knew how to give it meaning. To stay in her shadow and therefore feel strong and secure. Yes, yes, yes. Start again.

The only woman’s body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself?

I was suddenly sure that, without being aware of it, I had intercepted Lila’s feelings and was adding them to mine. Why did she have that expression, that ill humor? Had she caressed her leg, her hip, as a sort of farewell? Had she touched herself, speaking, as if she felt the edges of her body besieged by Melina, by Giuseppina, and was frightened, disgusted by it? Had she turned to our friends out of a need to react?

I remembered when she told the rest of us about the murder, and the blood on the copper pot, and claimed that the killer of Don Achille was not a man but a woman, as if, in the story she was telling us, she had heard and seen the form of a female body break, from the need for hatred, the urgency for revenge or justice, and lose its substance.

That last question presented itself clearly when, from a simple recitation of the facts—years before, when she told me about her wedding night, we had talked only of the most brutal facts—Lila proceeded to talk generally about her sexuality. It was a subject completely new for us. The coarse language of the environment we came from was useful for attack or self-defense, but, precisely because it was the language of violence, it hindered, rather than encouraged, intimate confidences. So I was embarrassed, I stared at the floor, when she said, in the crude vocabulary of the neighborhood, that fucking had never given her the pleasure she had expected as a girl, that in fact she had almost never felt anything, that after Stefano, after Nino, to do it really annoyed her, so that she had been unable to accept inside herself even a man as gentle as Enzo. Not only that: using an even more brutal vocabulary, she added that sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes out of passion, she had done everything that a man could want from a woman, and that even when she had wanted to conceive a child with Nino, and had become pregnant, the pleasure you were supposed to feel, particularly at that moment of great love, had been missing.

Before such frankness I understood that I could not be silent, that I had to let her feel how close I was, that I had to react to her confidences with equal confidences. But at the idea of having to speak about myself—the dialect disgusted me, and although I passed for an author of racy pages, the Italian I had acquired seemed to me too precious for the sticky material of sexual experiences—my uneasiness grew, I forgot how difficult her confession had been, that every word, however vulgar, was set in the weariness in her face, in the trembling of her hands, and I was brief.

“For me it’s not like that,” I said.

I wasn’t lying, and yet it wasn’t the truth. The truth was more complicated and to give it a form I would have needed practiced words. I would have had to explain that, in the time of Antonio, rubbing against him, letting him touch me had always been very pleasurable, and that I still desired that pleasure. I would have had to admit that being penetrated had disappointed me, too, that the experience was spoiled by the sense of guilt, by the discomfort of the conditions, by the fear of being caught, by the haste arising from that, by the terror of getting pregnant. But I would have had to add that Franco—the little I knew of sex was largely from him—before entering me and afterward let me rub against one of his legs, against his stomach, and that this was nice and sometimes made the penetration nice, too. As a result, I would have had to tell her, I was now waiting for marriage, Pietro was a very gentle man, I hoped that in the tranquility and the legitimacy of marriage I would have the time and the comfort to discover the pleasure of coitus. There, if I had expressed myself like that, I would have been honest. But the two of us, at nearly twenty-five, did not have a tradition of such articulate confidences. There had been only small general allusions when she was engaged to Stefano and I was with Antonio, bashful phrases, hints. As for Donato Sarratore, as for Franco, I had never talked about either one. So I kept to those few words—For me it’s not like that—which must have sounded to her as if I were saying: Maybe you’re not normal. And in fact she looked at me in bewilderment, and said as if to protect herself:

“In the book you wrote something else.”
So she had read it. I murmured defensively:
“I don’t even know anymore what ended up in there.”
“Dirty stuff ended up in there,” she said, “stuff that men don’t want to hear and women know but are afraid to say. But now what—are you hiding?”

She used more or less those words, certainly she said dirty. She, too, then, cited the risqué pages and did it like Gigliola, who had used the word dirt. I expected that she would offer an evaluation of the book as a whole, but she didn’t, she used it only as a bridge to go back and repeat what she called several times, insistently, the bother of fucking. That is in your novel, she exclaimed, and if you told it you know it, it’s pointless for you to say: For me it’s not like that. And I mumbled Yes, maybe it’s true, but I don’t know. And while she with a tortured lack of shame went on with her confidences—the great excitement, the lack of satisfaction, the sense of disgust—I thought of Nino, and the questions I had so often turned over and over reappeared. Was that long night full of tales a good moment to tell her I had seen him? Should I warn her that for Gennaro she couldn’t count on Nino, that he already had another child, that he left children behind him heedlessly? Should I take advantage of that moment, of those admissions of his, to let her know that in Milan he had said an unpleasant thing about her: Lila is made badly even when it comes to sex? Should I go so far as to tell her that in those agitated confidences of hers, even in that way of reading the dirty pages of my book, now, while she was speaking I seemed to find confirmation that Nino was, in essence, right? What in fact had Sarratore’s son intended if not what she herself was admitting? Had he realized that for Lila being penetrated was only a duty, that she couldn’t enjoy the union? He, I said to myself, is experienced. He has known many women, he knows what good female sexual behavior is and so he recognizes when it’s bad. To be made badly when it comes to sex means, evidently, not to be able to feel pleasure in the male’s thrusting; it means twisting with desire and rubbing yourself to quiet that desire, it means grabbing his hands and placing them against your sex as I sometimes did with Franco, ignoring his annoyance, the boredom of the one who has already had his orgasm and now would like to go to sleep. My uneasiness increased, I thought: I wrote that in my novel, is that what Gigliola and Lila recognized, was that what Nino recognized, perhaps, and the reason he wanted to talk about it? I let everything go and whispered somewhat randomly:

“I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“That your pregnancy was without joy.”
She responded with a flash of sarcasm:
“Imagine how I felt.”

(Chapter 46, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay)

There is no foreplay. I am still in my socks trying to discern from the wallpaper a conclusion about the marriage that results in this, this man peeling off his Disco Sucks shirt and pulling me into his lap and apologizing about the delay because it has been thirteen years with the same woman, he says, thirteen years, and all the rules have changed, and so I try to help him out of his pants but his shoes are still on, shoes with laces that we both consider for a moment before we opt out and get his pants down only as far as they need to go, his face dark and urgent, his body taut and smattered with coarse, curly hair. Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany and Eric is talkative and filthy but there is some derangement about his face, this pink contortion that introduces the whites of his eyes in a way that makes me afraid he might say something we cannot recover from just yet, so I cover his mouth and say shut up, shut the fuck up, which is more aggressive than I would normally be at this point but it gets the job done and in general if you need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch though I feel panicked all of a sudden to have not used a condom and I’m looking around the room and there is a bathroom attached, and in the bathroom are what look to be extra towels and that makes me so emotional that he pauses and in one instant a concerned host rises out of his violent sexual mania, slowing the proceedings into the dangerous territory of eye contact and lips and tongue where mistakes get made and you forget that everything eventually dies, so it is not my fault that during this juncture I call him daddy and it is definitely not my fault that this gets him off so swiftly that he says he loves me and we are collapsing back in satiation and horror, not speaking until he gets me a car home and says take care of yourself like, please go, and as the car is pulling away he is standing there on the porch in a floral silk robe that is clearly his wife’s, looking like he has not so much had an orgasm as experienced an arduous exorcism, and a cat is sitting at his feet, utterly bemused by the white clapboard and verdant lawn, which makes me hate this cat as the city rises around me in a bouquet of dust, industrial soot, and overripe squash, insisting upon its own enormity like some big-dick postmodernist fiction and still beautiful despite its knowledge of itself, even as the last merciless days of July leave large swaths of the city wilted and blank.

(Raven Leilani, Luster, Chapter 2)

Do I look nice with my clothes off? she asked. He was touching his cock slowly while watching her. Yeah, you do, he said. Did I not tell you that before? Pulling her skirt and underwear off over her ankles, she said: I think as a teenager I did, but not anymore. Leaving her clothes hanging over the end of the bed, she got on top of him. I liked having you in my mouth, she said. Her eyes were closed, he was looking up her. That’s nice of you to say, he said. What did you like about it? She was breathing deeply. I was afraid you were going to be rough with me, she said, but you were very gentle. I don’t even mean rough, I just mean, I was afraid you would want me to try and take more of it when I knew I couldn’t. He had his left hand on her hip. You mean like the people in porn, he said. She said yes. Yeah, but I think that’s a fairly specialised skill they have, he said. I wouldn’t expect your average person to be able to do that. With her eyes closed, Alice said that if he wanted her to learn how to do it, she would want to try. Still watching her face attentively he said: Don’t worry about that. You give very good head the way it is. Is that what you prefer to call it, by the way? Or something else? She was smiling, she said she wasn’t fussy. But there must be some words that turn you off a bit, he said. Would there not be? Like if I said, I want you to suck my cock, you probably wouldn’t like it. She laughed and said she wouldn’t mind, but she thought it sounded more funny than sexy. He agreed it was funny, and said it sounded like something from a film. Do you hate the word ‘fuck’? he said. Some people do, I don’t mind it. But if I said, can we fuck now, would that put you off? She said it would not put her off. Alright, he said, let me fuck you, then. He withdrew his hand, his fingers glistening wet and leaving wet prints on her skin where he touched her. When the head of his cock entered her she took a deep breath and gripped his shoulder under her hand. He was still fully dressed, wearing the same green sweatshirt with the little embroidered logo. You’re very small with your clothes off, he said. I don’t think I noticed you so small before. She made a moaning noise, shook her head, and said nothing. He sat up a little more and surveyed her. Do you need a second? he asked. She was taking long breaths and releasing them slowly, eyes closed. I’m okay, she said. Is that all of it? Perhaps because she wasn’t looking, he allowed himself to smile. Well, nearly, he said. Are you alright? Her face and neck were red. It is a lot, she said. He ran his hand down her side affectionately. Mm, he said. But it doesn’t hurt, does it? Still with her eyes held shut she replied: I think it did hurt a little bit the first time. He was touching her breast softly. The first time we were together? he said. You didn’t tell me. She shook her head, frowning as if with concentration. No, she said, but I didn’t want you to stop, it was nice. It makes me feel very full.

He licked his upper lip, still watching her. Ah, I love making you feel like that, he said. She opened her eyes and looked at him. He put his hands on her hips and pulled her down a little, gently, until he was all the way inside her. She drew in one long breath and then nodded, still looking at him. For a couple of minutes they fucked and said nothing. She shut her eyes tightly and he asked again if she was okay. Do you find it really intense, she said. He was looking up at her with an open expression on his face. Yeah, he said. I don’t think you could have looked better when you were a teenager than you do now, by the way. You look unbelievable now. And I have one more thought about it. A lot of what’s so sexy about you is the way you talk, and the little things you do. And I bet you couldn’t behave so nicely when you were younger, could you? And even if you could, not to be soft about it, but I’d still rather have you the way you are. Her breath was ragged then and she reached for his hand, which he gave to her. I’m coming, she said. She was holding his hand very tight. Quietly he said: Look at me for a second. She looked at him. Her mouth was open and she was crying out, her chest and neck pink. He looked back at her, and he was breathing hard. Finally she lay down against his chest, her knees drawn up around him. He ran his hand down over her spine. A minute went by, then five minutes. Here, don’t fall asleep like that, he said. Let’s lie down properly. She rubbed her eye with the back of her hand, and got up off him. He rearranged his clothes while she lay down naked on the mattress beside him. Then he took her hand and kissed it. That was alright, he said, wasn’t it? She nestled her head back on the pillow and laughed. I didn’t know you used to live in London, she said. He smiled to himself, still holding her hand. There’s a lot you don’t know about me, he said. She rolled her shoulders luxuriously against the bedsheets.

Tell me everything, she said.

(Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You, Chapter 17)

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union—

In my mind tonight
I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused in one sound
that mounts and mounts and then
is split into the old selves,
the tired antagonisms. Do you see?
We were made fools of.
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.

How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?

(Louise Glück, “Mock Orange”)

This fact is observable in the variously modulated scale of what may be included, ultimately, under the general heading of mimicry. It is this that comes into play, quite obviously, both in sexual union and in the struggle to the death. In both situations, the being breaks up, in an extraordinary way, between its being and its semblance, between itself and that paper tiger it shows to the other. In the case of display, usually on the part of the male animal, or in the case of grimacing swelling by which the animal enters the play of combat in the form of intimidation, the being gives of himself; or receives from the other, something that is like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown off in order to cover the frame of a shield. It is through this separated form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and death, and it might be said that it is with the help of this doubling of the other, or of oneself, that is realized the conjunction from which proceeds the renewal of beings in reproduction.

We now come back to the little blues, little whites, little browns of Cézanne, or again to the delightful example that Maurice Merleau-Ponty gives in passing in his Signes, namely, that strange slow-motion film in which one sees Matisse painting. The important point is that Matisse himself was overwhelmed by the film. Maurice Merleau-Ponty draws attention to the paradox of this gesture which, enlarged by the distension of time, enables us to imagine the most perfect deliberation in each of these brush strokes. This is an illusion, he says.What occurs as these strokes, which go to make up the miracle of the picture, fall like rain from the painter’s brush is not choice, but something else. Can we not try to formulate what this something else is?

Should not the question be brought closer to what I called the rain of the brush? If a bird were to paint would it not be by letting fall its feathers, a snake by casting off its scales, a tree by letting fall its leaves? What it amounts to is the first act in the laying down of the gaze. A sovereign act, no doubt, since it passes into something that is materialized and which, from this sovereignty, will render obsolete, excluded, inoperant, whatever, coming from elsewhere, will be presented before this product.

Let us not forget that the painter’s brushstroke is something in which a movement is terminated. We are faced here with something that gives a new and different meaning to the term regression—we are faced with the element of motive in the sense of response, in so far as it produces, behind it, its own stimulus.

There, that by which the original temporality in which the relation to the other is situated as distinct is here, in the scopic dimension, that of the terminal moment. That which in the identificatory dialectic of the signifier and the spoken will be projected forward as haste, is here, on the contrary, the end, that which, at the outset of any new intelligence, will be called the moment of seeing.