The House of the Sleeping Beauties Read Free Page B

travel back over memories of women with whom he had had affairs. And old love had come back tonight because the sleeping beauty had given him the illusion that he smelled milk.
    Perhaps the blood on the breast of that girl from long ago had made him sense in the girl tonight an odor that did not exist. Perhaps it was a melancholy comfort for an old man to be sunk in memories of women who would not come back from the far past, even while he fondled a beauty who would not awaken. Eguchi was filled with a warm repose that had loneliness in it. He had but touched her lightly to see whether her breast was wet, and the twisted thought had not come to him of leaving her to be startled when she awoke after him, at having had blood drawn from her breast. Her breasts seemed to be beautifully rounded. A strange thought came to him: why, among all animals, in the long course of the world, had the breasts of the human female alone become beautiful?
    It might be so too with lips. Old Eguchi thought of women getting ready for bed, of women taking off cosmetics before bed. There had been woman with pale lips when they took off their lipstick, and woman whose lips had shown the dirtiness of age. In the gentle light from the ceiling and the reflection of the velvet on the four walls, it was not clear whether or not the girl was lightly made up, but she had not gone so far as to have her eyebrows shaved. The lips and the teeth between them had a fresh glow. Since she could scarcely have perfumed her mouth, what came to him was the scent of a young woman's mouth. Eguchi did not like wide, dark nipples. From the glimpse he had had when he raised the quilt, it appeared that hers were still small and pink. She was sleeping face up, and he could kiss her breasts. She was certainly not a girl whose breasts he could have disliked kissing. If it was so with a man his age, thought Eguchi, then the really old men who came to the house must quite lose themselves in the joy, be willing to take any chance, to pay any price. There had probably been greedy ones among them, and their images were not wholly absent from Eguchi's mind. The girl was asleep and knew nothing. Would the face and the form remain untouched and unsullied, as they were befire him now? Because she was so beautiful asleep, Eguchi stopped short of the ugly act toward which these thoughts led him. Was the difference between him and the other old men that he still had in him. Something to function as a man? For the others, the girl would pass the night in bottomless sleep. He had twice tried, though gently, to arouse her, He did not himself know what he had meant to do if by chance the girl had opened her eyes, but he had probably made the try out if affection. No, he supposed it had rather been from his own disquiet and emptiness.
    "Maybe I should go to sleep?" He heard himself muttering uselessly, and he added: "It's not forever. Not forever, for her or for me."
    He closed his eyes. This strange night was, as all other nights, one from which he would awake up alive in the morning. The girl's elbow, as she lay with her index finger touched to her mouth, got in his way. He took her wrist and brought it to his side. He felt her pulse, holding the wrist between his index and middle fingers. It was gentle and regular. Her quiet breath was somewhat slower than Eguchi's. From time to time the wind passed over the house, but it no longer carried the sound of approaching winter. The roar of the waves against the cliff softened while rising. Its echo seemed to come up from the ocean as music sounding in the girl's body, the beating in her breasts, and the pulse at her wrist added to it. In time with the music, a pure white butterfly danced past his closed eyelids. He took his hand from her wrist. Nowhere was he touching her. The scent of her breath, of her body, of her hair, were of them strong.
    Eguchi thought of the several days when he had run off to Kyoto, taking the back-country route, with the