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same old gestures and foreplay of weary seduction, this was due to that little ritual couples must observe rather than upset the sequence. This also explains our interest in the ups and downs in the life of the prostitute with whom we have just entered a rented room. She might even be offended or we might feel we had offended her if we were not to ply her with questions.
    Within the half-hour Olga the secretary finished drinking the first whisky and started on a second. Within the half-hour I made a rapid sketch of her, but a good likeness, and in order to show it to her and examine it together, I sat beside her on the divan. Sitting slightly further back, I was able to lean over her shoulder and brush my face against her hair. Familiar ruses giving the appearance of being distracted and at the same time denying it, whereby the equivocation becomes extreme in this tacit game in which both sides play with their own and each other’s cards while pretending to be mere spectators. It was at some point within this half-hour that she asked me if she could keep the sketch and I began insisting that I wanted her to have it. Then, next minute, I was pulling her toward me by the shoulders and turning her toward me, began putting my lips to hers. And believe me, if she drew her face away it was only so that everything should not be confined to that moment, which already had its surfeit of pleasure given and accepted, and might therefore be considered incomplete although essential for any pleasure to follow. I am playing with words as if I were using colors and still mixing them on my palette. I am playing with these events while searching for words, however tentative, to describe them. But I must confess that no drawing or painting of mine could ever convey what I have just ventured to express in writing. The mouth of Olga the secretary put itself within reach of mine as the black cloud from the center of my body, which is my sex and much more than simply sex, became charged with the rapid currents of a nameless fluid which draws my blood to secret caverns. I then knew that this was precisely what Olga the secretary had planned the moment S. asked her to call in person to cancel his appointment, or shortly afterward, and that all I had to do was to assist in this purification, first and foremost the involuntary agent of her revenge, already its agent before Olga the secretary even reached my flat and my sex was quiescent, hers unmistakably quivering with desire. We kissed like two adults who know all about kissing. We kissed, knowing how to get our lips into a comfortable position, how to prepare that first meeting of tongues, how to control our breathing. And we both knew exactly when I should lean over her and she should bend over me until we found ourselves half lying on the sofa, in possession of this new intimacy of bodies pressed up against each other as our mouths went on provoking from afar our sexual organs, which were already stimulated. The most difficult moment of all is when mouths separate: the least word can be excessive. Knowing this, I reached out to hold her breasts, and appearing to avoid me, she crossed her arms and pulled her blouse right over her head. Half dressed, we had no difficulty in making love. Driven by thoughts I could sense, she soon caught up and overtook me, allowing me to witness her orgasm in the motionless center of my black cloud until it was my turn to lose self-control and enter the maelstrom. As first acts go, it had been excellent. No words were spoken, and I was frightened because I was dependent on her for any serenity afterward or that common and ill-disguised vexation which can so easily ensue in these situations. I could see from the position we were in that I must be pressing on her leg, and I asked her if it was painful. “A little,” she replied, and these were the first words exchanged, and the movement that followed was facilitated by the same physical discomfort as we began getting