The Dying Animal Read Online Free PDF Page A

Uncontrollably she is in motion within. I was still above her—kneeling over her and dripping on her—we were looking each other cold in the eye, when, after swallowing hard, she snapped her teeth. Suddenly. Cruelly. At me. It wasn't an act. It was instinctive. It was snapping her teeth by using the full force of the masticatory muscles to violently raise the lower jaw. It was as though she were saying, That's what I could have done, that's what I wanted to do, and that's what I didn't do.
    At last the forthright, incisive, elemental response from the contained classical beauty. Till then it was all controlled by narcissism, by exhibitionism, and despite the energetic display, despite the audacity, it was strangely inert. I don't know whether Consuela remembers that bite, that activating bite that freed her from her own surveillance and inaugurated her into the sinister dream, but I will never forget it. The full amorous truth. The instinctual girl bursting not just the container of her vanity but the captivity of her cozy Cuban home. It was the true beginning of her mastery—the mastery into which my mastery had initiated her. I am the author of her mastery of me.
    You see, I think that in me Consuela sensed a possessable version of her family's refinement, of that unrecoverable aristocratic past that is more or less a myth to her. A man of the world. A cultural authority. Her teacher. Now, most people are appalled by the vast difference in age, but it is the very thing Consuela is drawn to. The erotic oddness is all most people register, and they register it as repugnance, as repugnant farce. But the age I am has great significance for Consuela. These girls with old gents don't do it despite the age—they're drawn to the age, they do it
for
the age. Why? In Consuela's case, because the vast difference in age gives her permission to submit, I think. My age and my status give her, rationally, the license to surrender, and surrendering in bed is a not unpleasant sensation. But simultaneously, to give yourself over intimately to a much, much older man provides this sort of younger woman with authority of a kind she cannot get in a sexual arrangement with a younger man. She gets both the pleasures of submission
and
the pleasures of mastery. A boy submitting to her power, what does that amount to in a creature so patently desirable? But to have this man of the world submitting solely because of the force of her youth and her beauty? To have gained the total interest, to have become the consuming passion of a man inaccessible in every other arena, to enter a life she admires that would otherwise be closed to her—that's power, and it's the power she wants. It isn't that the dominance is being traded sequentially; it's being traded continuously. Not so much being traded as being braided. And therein lies the source not only of my obsession with her but of her counterobsession with me. Or so I had it figured at the time, for all the good it did me in attempting to understand what she was up to and why I was getting in deeper and deeper.
    No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game. A man wouldn't have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn't venture off to get fucked. It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives. I know this as well as anyone. Every last vanity will come back to mock you. Read Byron's
Don Juan.
Yet what do you do if you're sixty-two and believe you'll never have a claim on something so perfect again? What do you do if you're sixty-two and the urge to take whatever is still takable couldn't be stronger? What do you do if you're sixty-two and you realize that all those bodily parts invisible up to now (kidneys, lungs, veins, arteries, brain, intestines, prostate, heart) are about to start making themselves distressingly apparent, while the organ most conspicuous