Erotic Runway

Presumably, the narrator, who feels words, requires a double imago. A furious mind that penetrates her to the bone and makes her shiver like in an early 19th-century English novel, and someone who can innocently invite her to an ice cream parlor in such a way that the narrator loses herself in the thought that he might, while talking about Oscar Wilde, touch a thigh so that she risks biting the straw in her iced coffee.

For Nana, every sexual interaction is as beautiful as the narration that crowns the act. In a bed-warm, drowsy moment during the last pre-pandemic summer, she associates a freshly turned, grandly adorned grave with prestige. She sees herself at a bourgeois funeral with a famous eulogist. Nana sits next to Goya, and that alone is enough to prompt a conspiratorial closeness.

Everywhere lurk the pitfalls of the mechanical. A wrong word, whose redundancy reveals how detached the speaker is from the matter, shortens the erotic runway so that Nana cannot take off.

A wordlessly performed, orgasmically concluded act remains a dreary affair. Something can be tedious and still end with an orgasm. Desire has its own alphabet; everyone must start over whenever they wish to become personal with themselves.

Charles Baudelaire called George Sand a “petty bourgeois of immorality.” He attributed to her the judgment depth of a “guardian.” Nana would not utter a word about this if it were not Baudelaire, who, as Hans Mayer explains, “uncovered the dialectic of scandal and bourgeois conformity in the case of George Sand.”

Aurora and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch are sought-after figures. Leopold is highly regarded as a scandalous author. The most original minds of the era flock to the knight of letters in Graz without minding his down-to-earth exaggerations. Down-to-earth, Nana notes, because the spatial radius of the erotomaniac forms a stable counterpoint to his literary excesses. The urban center of Styria is for many years the pivot of an author with European influence.

Aurora meets Alberta von Maytner, who publishes under the pseudonym Margarethe Halm. For odd reasons, the writer avoids public interaction. In summer it is too hot, in autumn too cool, in winter too cold. Spring is omitted from the list.

Cold makes one “ugly.” Maytner receives visitors in her bedroom. A bed draped with gauze functions as the pièce de résistance, Aurora says. She finds Maytner “still… pretty enough.”

In bed, the ultradomestic woman wears a “court dress… with an enormous train.”

“Her black hair, which had to languish in wraps three days a week, was now free and flowed in graceful waves down her back.”

Maytner considers herself the matriarch of a new humanity. In her bedroom, she receives divine messages. She attempts to make the pleasantly skeptical Aurora esoterically salivate, while Leopold panders to the eccentric. No one can be too absurd for him.

Among the most extravagant personalities in Leopold’s orbit is the editor and translator Anna-Catherine Strebinger. She has “self-purchased flowers or self-sent telegrams delivered to the theater,” to receive them with grand astonishment.

Aurora calls her Kathrin. In Austria, Anna appears as the epitome of a Frenchwoman, though with a Bavarian father in the heated postbellum climate after 1871, she cannot truly be French. Her lifelong fiancé, the passionate anti-Bonapartist and at times French presidential candidate Marquis de Rochefort, is forced by his party to choose: to yield to Kathrin, or lose the support of his faction.

Nana recounts this in Goya’s presence. He sits at her university desk, with a clear view of the institute’s linden tree outside the window.

She hears herself say: “I’ll never let you go again.”

From then on, she wants to be nothing but a charming picture. Nana wants to become an indelible part of Goya’s inner gallery. He should never get her out of his head. She makes a note for later: We have expended our arousal and now look at each other with timid eyes.

As mentioned, this is a fantasy. Sometimes they cruise together in Nana’s restored ’68 Mustang GT Fastback… and Goya even looks a bit like Steve McQueen as Lieutenant Frank Bullitt in the legendary chase through the streets of San Francisco… only now across the North Hessian savanna. They reach a floodplain in the Fulda valley. Nana believes she is dreaming, so blue is the lake in the glacial landscape. The lake fills a travers de glaciares, a charming glacial trough. Boys sing wicked songs along its shore, veined with primeval roots. Her beasts flirt with cyclists’ calves.