“Yours,” she whispered. “Whatever you say, I am.”
“Clever, clever,” Mallare muttered, “it speaks to me and I hear. It says ‘yours.’ I become too involved. Or perhaps this is only a dream. Of course, what else can it be? Part of me has fallen asleep and is dreaming. And [Seventy-three] because I am mad I fancy myself awake. And my senses obey me. Desire whispers to them, ‘Hear voices. See flesh. Feel desire,’ and like five little awkward masochists they prostrate themselves before my madness.
“But my senses are of no great interest. There is this other—this mania of possession of which passion, compounded of all the senses, is but an unimportant fragment. I am a man with a woman inside him. I possess the secret of the hermaphroditic Gods. I am complete.”
Rita kneeled beside him and his hands stroked her black hair. Her face remained raised in adoration. Mallare, observing her eyes, nodded satisfactions at them.
“Who but Mallare could have done this?” he whispered aloud to her. “Mallare, infatuated with himself, desires still a further adoration. So he creates infatuated phantoms. I am tired now. My hands are tired. Return, little one, to the couch of my madness and sleep for a time in its shadows.“
[Seventy-four]
Mallare shut his eyes and his hands dropped to his side. Rita arose and smiled at him. He had spoken strangely, but his words were no longer mysteries since he had caressed her. She would lie now at his feet as she had dreamed of doing. She stretched herself out on the thick carpet.
Her childish mind fondled its unexpected memories. He had looked at her body and spoken beautiful words to it. She remembered the talk of the old ones of the caravan. A woman belongs to a man. This meant that she belonged to him. She had said, “Yours.”
Her face smiled itself to sleep.
[opp. 74]
