Memory №7: Victorian England. Pastor Jonathan. (The Art of Hypocrisy)

The air grew heavy and stuffy again, but this time not from the smell of sweat and earth, but from the suffocating aroma of wax, repressed desires, and the mustiness of tightly shuttered rooms.

I opened my eyes in the twilight of a room where every object was draped, every corner curtained, as if life itself were an indecent spectacle that must be hidden.

After sunny, blooming Florence, this world seemed like a velvet-lined crypt.

My guide into this era was Pastor Jonathan-a man with eyes the color of a winter sky and a soul encased in the crinoline of sanctimony.

We met at a charity bazaar. His speech on saving sinful souls sounded so fiery that I initially took it for hidden passion. How wrong I was.

Our meetings took place under the supervision of his elderly mother and were accompanied by the reading of psalms. He spoke of love for one's neighbor, but his fingers never once touched my hand. His ideal was not a living woman, but a disembodied image of purity.

"The flesh is the prison of the soul," he sermonized, avoiding my gaze. "The marital bed is a duty, a tribute to sinful humanity for the continuation of the species. Pleasure, however, is a vice leading to the fiery Gehenna."

When, after months of courtship, he finally proposed, I hoped deep down that some spark of life hid behind the puritanical facade. But our wedding night began with a prayer; he knelt and prayed for "forgiveness of sinful flesh."

The room was cold, despite the roaring fireplace. His touches were hurried and trembling.

And then I saw it. He touched me in gloves. Literally. His fingers in the finest kid leather slid over my skin with disgust, as if touching something unclean. They trembled-not with passion, but with horror at my nakedness, at the very essence of womanhood.

"Wife," he hissed, his voice breaking into a falsetto. "Let us perform our marital duty." And in these words, there was nothing but revulsion for the act itself.

He did his business with an expression of profound suffering on his face, as if performing not an act of love but an execution upon himself. His movements were sharp, mechanical. He did not look into my eyes. His breath smelled of mint lozenges-his only permitted weakness.

When it was over, he recoiled from me as if from a leper.

"Forgive me," he muttered, wrapping himself in his robe. "This… animal side of our nature… is necessary, but repulsive."

He left to pray for forgiveness, leaving me alone in the cold bed. I lay there, staring at the velvet canopy, and felt not like a woman, but an instrument of sin. There was no pain within me-only an icy emptiness. He had not taken my energy; he had defiled its very source.

In the morning, he avoided my gaze. Our subsequent marital duties were reduced to quick, almost violent acts in complete darkness, after which he always left to cleanse himself with prayer. Our family life became a sophisticated torture of hypocrisy. By day-a model couple: he preached sermons on the sinfulness of the flesh, while I distributed alms to the poor. By night-the same hurried, guilty acts, after which he prayed until dawn.

Once, I wore a nightgown of the finest Chinese silk, smuggled in by traders. Seeing me, Jonathan was not inflamed with desire-he flew into a rage.

"These are the garments of harlots!" he cried, his face contorted in a grimace of genuine hatred. "You desecrate our marriage!" He grabbed the knife used for cutting the pages of the Bible and slashed the gown to shreds, which he threw into the fireplace. I watched the silk burn and felt the last of my hope die within me.

The most terrible part was that, at times, I caught his gaze upon me-hungry, animalistic, full of the very desire he so vehemently suppressed. He wanted me. But his hypocrisy, his fear of his own desires, were stronger. He loved me… as a sin he dreamed of drowning in but was afraid to even wet his feet.

I became for him a reminder of the Fall, the living embodiment of what he tried to suppress within himself. Our marriage turned into a silent war between flesh and spirit, where there could be no victors.

The grandeur of male sensuality was castrated by the scissors of morality. What remained was a dreary mechanical act for procreation, seasoned with prayer and soda for douching. Rembrandt had been turned into a caricature in the church newsletter.

I left him after a year. I said I was returning to an ailing aunt in Scotland, but instead, I boarded a ship bound for America. He made no attempt to stop me, and on the day of my departure, he gave me a Bible with a bookmark placed at the page on the sin of adultery.

An era that took from love not only its wings, but its very right to a name.

But even then, somewhere in secret boudoirs, life simmered. Women read forbidden novels, and men furtively admired engravings of odalisques.

I opened my eyes. The coffee shop. The guy by the window hesitantly took the girl's hand, and she did not pull it away. I looked at them with a new, strange tenderness. At least they were not afraid of touch. Did not consider it a sin.

Nature cannot be fooled. It always takes its due.

And ahead of me awaited the America of the 60s, with its naive belief that freedom can be declared by decree. But that is a completely different story.