“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...
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