Chapter Ninety-Seven
Speaking of bodily fluids, Genevra was at that very minute standing before her easel, painting a picture of Rosella perched upon Enid’s mouth, with Enid’s open legs welcoming the complementary attentions of Rosella’s tongue. (Both were undressed, I think it hardly needs to be said.)
What was Genevra thinking, at this moment in time?
It consisted of inarticulate emotion, untranslatable, in a strict sense, into words; but the general drift would go something like, In the past, I was content to revel in the flesh, and justify it as a form of requisite content for my art. All my acolytes, those malleable maidens studying art back in Florence, in their unquestioning submission to my fancies, of whom I had no qualms in making extensive use, as models and to quench my, as it turns out, unquenchable lust—as they were attracted to me not for my physical attributes, but on account of my talent and prestige, there seemed no natural end to the queue of them I would enjoy; not, at least, until my death (if, indeed, such a thing will really come). But now—now I have discovered a new plane of existence: one in which the tripartite variables of erotic titillation, artistic sublimity and romantic love depend like apples from a bending bough: each pull on one pulls also on the others; no, because they are not discrete. Rather, three colours in a mix; three notes in a chord; three shapes in a gestalt; three persons in a trinity, all of which reconfigure unholy reality into a blessing, begging for transmutation into art, to then be sacrificed to the deities of art—Enid’s tongue, Rosella’s fanny, and my paintbrush shall consecrate that bed, this air, and our time, into something to justify the continued existence of our species on this earth.
All right. But what about Rosella? What were her thoughts?
They might read something like: Finally, finally, I feel on the verge of losing myself. After running from myself for so long, across this continent, out of the clutches of family and faith, escaping the claws of the iron maiden of gender, now, here, with these two, the world outside no doubt by now a melted icicle, I can let all that slide away, like juice from my vagina. Through the triple valves of art, eroticism and love, all the air which filled me has sputtered out, and my melted self is free to dribble into Enid’s holes, stain Genevra’s canvas, evaporate to Heaven. No one may look at me anymore. For there is no me at which to look.
And her tongue pushed through the origami-folds of Enid’s pudendum, like it was diligently, tenderly and unyieldingly teasing out the meaning of a poem.
“And what about Enid?” you ask. “Might we not eavesdrop on her thoughts too?”
Indeed, Reader, we might. But I shall condense, and paraphrase, else this already bloated tome will balloon out of all plausible proportion, given her proliferating cornucopia of sensations.
Enid, with Rosella’s rear depressed daintily upon her face, felt a profound co-mingling of the same aesthetic, romantic and erotic pleasures. Her tongue penetrating impudently into the fleshy ruffles of space-time—reflecting mournfully on the human condition, as no matter how hard she pushed her tongue inside, she could never reach all the way, into an apotheosis she intuited to be just another few millimetres further—Enid gazed into Rosella’s tiny, lemon-puckered anus and imagined it a contracted fist clenching the infinite sands of cosmic wisdom, and if it would only have opened, camera shutter-like, as if in answer to prayer, all the meaning of the universe would have plopped down upon her contemplative brow. She would have gladly remained locked in this epistemological grapple with this erotic mystery for all eternity, flipping noiselessly, end over end, through space, until the universe should have tired of itself and finally faded away.
When they were done—the consummating brushstroke in sympathetic co-ordination with the two orgasmic exhalations of fleeing spirit—Rosella dismounted, and Enid gazed at her lover’s ghost-white skin shiver from her orgasm’s aftershocks, and marvelled at how nature could mould so ethereal a vessel for such an equally beauteous inhabiting apparition. While Rosella extended her gazelle-like limbs elegantly into her nightgown, Enid remained naked, melting into the bedsheet. Rosella could not remember her own name; it floated somewhere nearby, like an annoying fly, but she chose not to look, and prayed it would not bite. Genevra had tears in her eyes, for her painting was the best she’d ever done. “How long can this possibly last?” she asked, not in reference to her painting, but to the miracle they shared.