"Bernard Wolfe - Limbo '90" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Bernard)

more, that's true, but he doesn't want to caress her either, he's bored with her. When she came to visit
him yesterday she obediently lay down on his pallet so that he could take his pleasure of her but he
simply ignored her, sat in a corner munching on his nails and drawing parakeets and dozing off from time
to time.'

'Love which is tabooed by the village', Ubu said, 'cannot be enjoyed. True love is gentle and with much
quiet and no tonus, not wild.'

'When I cut out the aggression much of the sexuality goes too, they're Siamese twins. Maybe love is only
for the wild.'

'Those who enjoy such love are sick.'

'Tell that to Notoa's wife,' Martine said. He remembered his last conversation with the woman: she hadn't
had an orgasm since Notoa's operation, she was scared out of her wits that she might never be satisfied
any more, she knew that often happened to the wives of Mandungabas. 'She's getting very tense.'

'Then she is sick also. Perhaps Mandunga -'

'Absolutely not!'
Ubu was disturbed by the doctor's sudden forcefulness. 'Dear friend, is there something wrong?'

'We've had this out before. So long as a woman is not an active physical danger to anybody I will not
attack her orgasm with a knife, even if you think it's worse than an epileptic fit.'

'It is a sickness,' the old man said stubbornly. 'We have many normal women in our village. Why do they
not have this wildness?'

'For a very good reason - because you define a normal woman as one who does not have this wildness.
It's a joke, Ubu. Do you know why we always speak of these matters in my language, English? I'll tell
you why, it's because you have no words for such things in Mandunji. Oh, I know, I know, for you this
orgasm business, especially in a woman, is a collapse, a pathological letting-go, the same thing has been
believed by many tribes. But I have told you over and over that it is a sickness only if the community says
it is a sickness. In the West, where I came from, it was something that everybody wanted and was
encouraged to want, even women. Perhaps one woman out of ten fully achieved it and perhaps only four
men out of ten, but the sickness was not to have it. According to the doctors, anyway, the better doctors.
The priests were a little mixed up about the subject.'

'It cannot be a good thing,' Ubu said. 'The women who work to have it build up too much tension.'

'Orgasm is the body's best way of discharging its tension. Maybe a seesaw is better than a coffin.'

They passed through the animal lab; marmosets and spider monkeys, pottos and slow lorises raised their
bandaged heads and regarded the two men with indifference. At the far end of the room they passed
through an archway and entered Martine's office-library. They sat down on matted-straw chairs.

Martine waved his hand at the bound volumes which lined the walls, hundreds of them, the case histories
and experimental records accumulated in eighteen and a half years of Mandunga. 'If the queer-limbs
come', he said, 'they must not get their hands on all this. Whether they come as friends or as enemies.'