There were reasons for this too. It was slight burn scarring. Once she had poured a load of strong perfume on her neck and then imprudently exposed herself to a sunlamp, which had practically seared the stuff into her skin.

If only she had stayed as she was! I might have been able to see the mother in her. But that was abhorrent to her.

She did not understand that she was played out as a woman, and that a ruined castle with electric lights and central heating is an absurdity. One evening, when I returned home after further large gambling losses, she received me with distinct coolness. For me a moment of calm. I only wish it had gone on longer. But she pressed herself to me, her face pouty as ever (to the extent that her enameled mask was still capable of a pout). She wanted me to ask why she was angry. But I had many things on my mind that day, not just her. My experiments were refusing to yield a positive result. And also: my financial difficulties were mounting. But the longer I was silent, the more she was driven to speak; the cooler I was, the more vehement she became. As finally emerged, she had found out that I had completely neglected my practice, that the once clean rooms of our clinic were now polluted with animal material of an infectious nature. How had she happened on it? Only through her accursed love for me! I had dismissed my assistant in order to save money. She knew this and had thought to lighten my load with the help of a young doctor, a friend of her daughter, and the three of them had toured the premises, which she had a legal right to do as owner.

Her surprise was understandably great. She had never thought me capable of a lie. She loved me so much and knew me so well! And now? She became upset, she opened her mouth wide and showed her blindingly white, gold-rimmed false teeth, her sumptuous dressing gown hung open, she stamped on the floor, and one of the thin elastic stockings that she wore underneath the flesh-colored silk ones, stretched around the varicose veins, tore with a sizzling sound.

She was in the right, I was in the wrong. And yet she angered me, I had had enough of her, I vented my desperation upon her, the miscarriage of my experimental plans, my poisoned youth, all the disappointments of my life. I hurled myself upon her, I at last gave voice to the cruelest, most hurtful words, I balled my fists, I did to her both mentally and physically everything that one person can do to another without causing lasting damage–brutal, but within the law.

She doubled over in pain, her enameled mask twitched like a fish, but suddenly a sentimental, sensual smile came to her lips, she threw herself at my feet, and when I pushed her away, disliking such theatrical scenes, she crawled after me, she began to giggle coyly, and the more brutally I kicked her, the more blissful she became.

And the ghastliest thing of all was that her arousal was transmitted to me, that she overpowered me sexually. Ugly, aging, with gold-rimmed porcelain teeth, enameled face, wrinkled, perfume-scorched skin–what is the point of enumerating all her physical imperfections, down to the singed smell of her body–she was stronger than I. I, who had wanted finally to break with her, was possessed by her in the midst of my cruelties. Never before, neither with my beautiful young mistress nor with her still more beautiful virgin sister, had I felt what now thrilled me, what shook me to the marrow.

My father had taught me how to do away with a living creature and do it coldly. It came back to me now, the thing he had stirred up in me when I was young, perhaps thirteen. Pleasurable sensations, disgusting animals, and death had parts to play. This is not the time to go into it. But why was I thinking of him now, now of all times? Was I not “making love” to my wife? Or was it that I hated her, was I clinging, still, more than ever, to him? My wife–but why speak of it?

Her little dog was howling.

VII

This little dog, as innocent as it was, became the source of new conflict. The howling of which I spoke just now must have been an expression of its terror of me. And the terror experienced by this thinking, feeling animal (albeit one with thoughts and feelings quite different from those of a person) was not entirely without foundation. For that little dog, which had mysteriously vanished some weeks earlier, had been found unexpectedly by my wife and the young doctor in the basement rooms of the clinic, shut in an animal cage made of heavy iron wire.