Little Birds by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online Page A

as long as he wanted. Her arms were flung outwards; her breasts lay under his eyes like an offering. He was roused with desire for her but still did not dare touch her. Instead he brought his drawing paper and pencils, sat at her side and sketched her. As he worked, he had the feeling that he was caressing each perfect line in her body.
    He was able to continue for two hours. When he observed the effect of the sleeping pills beginning to wear off, he pulled down the nightgown, covered her with the sheet and left the room.
    Later, María was surprised to notice a new enthusiasm for work in her husband. He locked himself in his studio for whole days, painting from the pencil sketches he made in the mornings.
    In this way he completed several paintings of her, always reclining, always asleep, as she had been the first day she posed. María was amazed by this obsession. She thought it was merely a repetition of the first pose. He always altered the face. Since her actual expression was forbidding and severe, no one who saw these paintings ever imagined that the voluptuous body was that of María.
    Novalis no longer desired his wife when she was awake, with her puritanical expression and stern eyes. He desired her when she was asleep, abandoned, rich and soft.
    He painted her without respite. When he was alone with a new painting in his studio he lay on the couch in front of it, and then a warmth ran through his whole body, as his eyes rested on the maja's breasts, on the valley of her belly, on the hair between her legs. He began to feel an erection stirring. He was surprised at the violent effect of the painting.
    One morning he stood in front of María as she lay sleeping. He had succeeded in parting her legs slightly, so as to see the line between them. Watching her unconstrained pose, her opened legs, he fingered his sex with the illusion that she was doing it. How often he had led her hand to his penis, trying to obtain this caress from her, but she was always repulsed and moved her hand away. Now he enclosed his penis fully in his own strong hand.
    María soon realized that she had lost his love. She did not know how to win it back. She became aware that he was in love with her body only as he painted it.
    She went to the country to stay with friends for a week. But after a few days she fell ill and returned home to see her doctor. When she arrived at the house it looked uninhabited. She tiptoed to Novalis's studio. There was no sound. Then she began to imagine that he was making love to a woman. She approached the door. Slowly and noiselessly, like a thief, she opened it. And this is what she saw: on the floor of the studio, a painting of herself; and lying over it, rubbing himself against it, her husband, naked, with his hair wild, as she had never seen him, his penis erect.
    He moved against the painting lasciviously, kissing it, fondling it between the legs. He lay against it as he never had against her. He seemed driven into a frenzy, and all around him were the other paintings of her, nude, voluptuous, beautiful. He threw a passionate glance at them and continued his imaginary embrace. It was an orgy with her he was having, with a wife he had not known in reality. At the sight of this, María's own controlled sensuality flared up, free for the first time. When she took off her clothes, she revealed a María new to him, a María illumined with passion, abandoned as in the paintings, offering her body shamelessly, without hesitation to all his embraces, striving to efface the paintings from his emotions, to surpass them.

A Model
    My mother had European ideas about young girls. I was sixteen. I had never gone out alone with young men, I had never read anything but literary novels, and by choice I never was like girls of my age. I was what you would call a sheltered person, very much like some Chinese woman, instructed in the art of making the most of the discarded dresses sent to me by a rich cousin,