“Directly after copulation, the devil’s laughter is heard,” observed Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimist about matters sexual and metaphysical, whose theory of suffering stemmed from the impossibility of truly and fully consummating desire. His aphorism describes the condition of postcoital tristesse and avows the futility of life, from which sex only ever offers a transient reprieve. The betrayal of sex, to Schopenhauer, is a metonym for the betrayal of life. We are never finally and decisively released from our desires, and when the frenzied pursuit is over, there is often a sobering reacclimatization to mundane life: all unchanged, unchanged utterly.
But this isn’t the sort of revelation that comes to mind for a girl who has had sex just once or twice. It comes with experience—something Blanca Arias, a primally beautiful Latin American arriviste in Madrid, newly unyoked from the supervision of her parents, exuberantly does not have. In its place, she has an unquenchable drive to please her husband-to-be through unconventional and mutinous means. In the opening pages of José Donoso’s The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria, she entertains a brief and titillating courtship with the marquess—a frill of a human being, and not an attractive one at that. As a lover, he has one thing going for him: a “sinful fantasy life born of exhausting himself night after night in the solitude of his bed at a Catholic boarding school.” He invites her to his family’s booth at the Royal Theater, where they put on a spectacular display of imagination, audacity, and appetite, stealthily maneuvering their programs for cover as he fingers her to the soaring arias of Lohengrin. Everyone thinks the marquess is a “twerp”—an unlikely donee of the feminine attentions paid to him by a lady as handsome as Blanca. The sexual success of this pasty, pubescent boy is the symptom of a “spiritual and moral perversity,” a “beautiful and interesting disease”—the strange product of a Spanish aristocracy that might be described the same way Arthur Symons once characterized the Decadent movement in literature.
They get married, but the transgression has dissolved and he can’t come. Nature reasserts itself: he dies of diphtheria. Blanca goes into mourning in the prime of her life, while radiating carnal passion and pleasure in black stockings and black ribbons. During this time of contemplation, she looks at her reflection in a pond and concludes that “her own destiny would be to experience everything.” Her short-lived marriage has planted a “seed of sensation” that rapaciously puts down roots, blossoms, and bears fruit. She fucks the notary, a compliant retainer who holds the purse strings of the massive wealth she has come into, and who smells like “aged starch or yellowed paper”; she is raped by, then rapes in turn, the count, a sexual connoisseur who is somehow related to the Lorias; she has ravenous sex with a painter, alternately embracing him and devouring his every body part.
This synopsis says something about the novel’s content, but the pleasure is in the prose, in the stimulating specificity of Donoso’s sexual configurations and the inventiveness of his erotic language, rendered sinuously in this translation by Megan McDowell. Couples don’t simply make love but “insinuate” with a “slight push-and-pull,” sink into “lagoons of crepuscular water,” and become a single “bicephalous and hermaphroditic animal of shared pleasure.” Blanca falls in love, but in the painter’s absence, discovers she will never really know him. She grows “deathly bored,” the last traces of innocence finally evaporating from her. This “definitive and harrowing” boredom is a premonition of something her body grasps before her brain does—that her libidinous romp, momentarily sanctioned for someone else’s entertainment, was not the expression of freedom and power she thought it was. Donoso has known this all along—but still he delights in Blanca’s innocence, in the precious and evanescent interlude, in the ecstatic moment that begs to be savored before the oppressive order of everyday life prevails again.
Publisher: New Directions Page count: 160 Price: $15.95 Key quote: “Millimeter by millimeter they versed themselves in their mutual topographies so sweaty with fear and desire, the hot vapor of their vegetative hollows, their crevices and protuberances swollen with love.” Shelve next to: Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, Arthur Rimbaud Unscientifically calculated reading time: The rebound period for a bereft nineteen-year-old widow
