Some more thoughts about Maria Ozawa: what disturbs me about her being a porn star is her gracefulness. While in Yugoslavia, Nicolas Bouvier was asked to write an article in a women’s magazine. He was given a lead: here in Yugoslavia, women can vote while in France, they can’t ( this was in the early fifties) . What do you think of that ? Amazingly he wrote that he had no fixed opinion on the matter and that after the short time time he had spent in Yugoslavia, he wished that the women there would militate less and spend more energy à essayer de plaire . This is difficult to translate. I could say: “(…) spend more energy at being charming” . But that sounds so trite. “(…) spend more energy at pleasing” sounds very servile. Plaire is not the same “to please”, it is more noble in the French scheme of things, more essential to life. Maybe we should go back to Shakespeare’s times. I think it’s at the end of Twelfth Night that the Fool comes upon the scene and apologizes for any blunders in the play, and assures the audience, groundlings included, “that we always strive to please”. Here, at a time when French and English were closer relatives, when Shakespeare wore a gold earing in one of his portraits ( personally, by the way, I believe that he wrote his own plays. I can’t understand the idea that someone can’t have been a genius because he had a modest, retiring life and was a sharp moneylender at the end of his life. Bach was a short tempered musician with twenty kids, Einstein was a bad husband of the normal kind and a civil servant in the Swiss administration. The idea that geniuses have to have odd lifestyles is a modern attempt to paint over the shallow hedonism of the likes of Elvis Presley with the gold varnish of genius) we find a better approximation of the idea of what “to please” meant in more refined times. It was an art de vivre , going much beyond the idea of pleasing one’s masters, though of course there were plenty of people who limited it to that.

The reader, if I have one, will think I have digressed far beyond the burning issue, which is, for her millions of adoring, heavily breathing fans, our great Maria Ozawa, but I am actually tacking close to the coast, as close as I can ever be in this world to her sweet self. Nicolas Bouvier, faced with what, to us readers 50 years later, seems the quaint topic of women’s right to vote, invokes the help of La Fontaine, who wrote somewhere in his charming (!) poems of “La grâce, plus belle encore que la beauté” ( Gracefulness, more beautiful even than beauty) . In those times, he assures us, the editor in chief of the women’s magazine only laughed at his opinions, which she found flattering but a trifle too frivolous to be published, and told him to write a fairy tale instead, which he did, after a tedious day walking around in Belgrade. Yet our man had touched on a vital subject.

Gracefulness. Porn stars are not supposed to have that quality. They, the descendants of the whores of the ancient brothels, should have a knowing smile, heavy, languid eyelids, massive, well oiled, breasts and buttocks. Their sexuality may be that of the horny farm girls they sometimes were, a few years before, if that simple, humorous randiness has survived the years in the brothel, or it could be the raunchy desire of the frustrated housewife ( One of the Roman satirists, I think it is Juvenal, wrote of the wife of one of the Emperors, one of the Virtuous Five, and he alleged that she, driven desperate by his sober lifestyle, spent all her nights in a cheap brothel, to be ridden upon by soldiers and merchants, only reluctantly leaving her smelly couch at the crack of dawn to return to her palace. Our tabloids sin by their hysterical industriousness, smashing their preys to pulp in Parisian tunnels. They lack the flights of fancy of their ancestors) , or it could be , as it probably is most of the time, a quick affair of undressing and a few moans, for in the end, the performance of a tired soldier or a drunk merchant comes to a paltry few thrusts and the crux of the matter is in putting on a maternal, understanding face as the client pours his heart out on the pillow afterwards, telling tales of bad deals, unfair pay, shrewish wives and grasping cousins.

All this everyday sexuality is the bread and butter of the whore. But the sacred groves of gracefulness… which make the heart leap as it remembers the first stirrings of love, at fourteen. That holy vessel of humanity, the secret jars in which the beloved keeps the waters of childhood – when the Lord speaks to Job of His power, He asks him: Do you know where I keep the great jars of the rain ? And the Muslims say that on the great night where the Prophet rode to Heaven on the mare Borak, the water in the jars becomes sweet ; isn’t the epitome of gracefulness the image of a woman carrying a jar back from the river, either on the side of her waist, or on her head ? Gracefulness finds its source in childhood because at its very heart lies a subtle gaucheness, a slight awkwardness of the wrist, of the hip, a tilt of the head, a hesitation, a shy withdrawal. Woman’s gracefulness is not the same as that of the snake or the leopard. Theirs is surer, more lethal. It may approach it, to the delight of the erotomaniac, but if it becomes completely like theirs, then it is deadly, to the further delight of said erotomaniac, because if he goes to the end of his cravings, then he wishes death (1) .

Baudelaire spoke of “les verts paradis des amours enfantines” in Moesta et Errabunda :

Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines,
Les courses, les chansons, les baisers, les bouquets,
Les violons vibrant derrière les collines,
Avec les brocs de vin, le soir, dans les bosquets,
— Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines,

L'innocent paradis, plein de plaisirs furtifs,
Est-il déjà plus loin que l'Inde et que la Chine?
Peut-on le rappeler avec des cris plaintifs,
Et l'animer encor d'une voix argentine,
L'innocent paradis plein de plaisirs furtifs?

At 13, a girl does not ( normally) have big breasts or buttocks. She only has her gracefulness, her vivacity- O the crystalline loves of that time ! “L’innocent paradis, plein de plaisirs furtifs”. Blessed the woman who can keep something of that in her adult years.

How odd that our Maria should spoil the water of her jars with the oil of the whore, the oil in the hair of her trader client, the oil in the voice of the Madame – nowadays a porn film executive in pin stripe suits. Ah well, that’s the way the world goes.

(1) Snakes and leopards do not laugh, and if they did, they would not cover their mouths with their hands ( with their tails, probably, in the case of snakes). Real, through-and-through eroticism is a grave matter, something undertakers should do as a side business.