The Golden Calves Read Online Free PDF Page B

repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.' ”
    Anita found, despite her pounding heart, that she was able to fix her eyes with a new-found calmness on that sneering countenance. After a few moments she replied: "Let me answer you as if you were speaking in all seriousness. For I give you my solemn word that my response would be the same. I could never even think of marrying a man who could lock out in the cold the creature that had been his pet and friend.”
    Carol’s high shriek of a laugh told her that her thrust had gone home. "You might at least reply to a joke with a joke!”
    "If yours was a joke, so much the better. But I had rather make a fool of myself than leave you trader a false impression. What I said I meant and shall always mean.”
    â€œWell, I guess unless the gods bring back that eminent cat lover and trainer Clyde Beatty, you are doomed to a life of chaste spinsterhood.”
    "That is my affair. And now, if you will forgive...”
    But she knew, as he stamped out of the room, that he never would.
    Â 
    Communications between them thereafter were kept to a minimum. Anita made a particular point to report to him only when absolutely necessary, for he never lost the chance to denigrate either her work or her character or, if neither of these availed, her person. She could usually manage to scuttle away before the flash of his ugly temper came to the attention of others. But there was one terrible occasion when he took a revenge so cruel that she seriously considered resigning her post.
    She happened to be studying the weird figures painted on the side of a Mayan pot, a new acquisition, when Carol walked in, purportedly to consult one of her books on pre-Columbian art, and peered over her shoulder. When he saw what she was looking at, he chuckled in a nasty way.
    "Can you make out what he’s doing?” He jabbed a finger at the male figure, whose beady eye and hooked nose suggested some organic connection with his eagle headdress.
    "Doing? Is he doing anything?”
    â€œLook at his hands."
    â€œThey seem to be in his lap.”
    Carol’s laugh shrilled to a high cackle. "That is one way of putting it, I suppose. The way Anita Vogel
would
put it. But those hands, I’m afraid, are engaged in a good deal more than resting in his lap. Those hands are engaged, very neatly, in slitting his penis.”
    Anita started up in horror. “Oh, no!”
    "Oh, yes, dear. We have excellent evidence that that is precisely what he is doing. And do you know what his lady consort is up to?” He paused while she stared at the pot as if he had turned it into a tarantula. "Well,
look,
silly.”
    â€œShe seems to be pulling something out of her mouth.”
    â€œShe is pulling a thorned rope through a hole that she has cut in her tongue."
    Anita had to stifle a scream. "But how can they be doing such frightful things to themselves? They don’t even seem to be suffering.”
    "Good point. We don’t know why that is. Was it the artist's incapacity to depict suffering, or were the self-mutilators under drugs, or was it considered
lise-majesti
to show royal persons in agony? For you understand, I’m sure, that what this lord and lady are doing was entirely voluntary. Indeed, it was considered one of the high privileges of their office. In the sacred ceremony of bloodletting the leaders of the nation were propitiating the gods for the benefit of their people. It was similar, of course, to our own deity assuming the crown of thorns and suffering the agony of the cross.”
    "And I thought theirs was a peaceful agrarian society,” she murmured.
    "How like you! You’ve been reading Morley, of course. Bowdlerized history. All that peace business has been long superseded. We now know the Mayas had one of the bloodiest civilizations known to history. Because they made war, not for defense or trade or territorial gain, but simply