Salome

Salome. Never has anyone been so captivating, never before nor in these twenty centuries since. She was shorter than average, and fatty like a seal - her surface smooth and firm and uniform, without the hillocks and crenellations of bone and wrinkle and crease. Her body, as she moved, never betrayed the workings of the architecture within, the creaking levering joints and gripping tendons. Salome had no parts. Her being was unitary, undifferentiated like a slug or a flame, and like a flame she moved altogether, spontaneously and un-urged. With Salome there was no ghost in the machine. She was a singular lump of spinning, writhing, mesmerising flesh.

I remember her today because of her vanity. It wasn't naturally hers, but people taught it her with their admiration. I taught it her. She was the incarnation of the erotic (you would have agreed with me S. I'm sure), and she captured men everywhere. Even the eunuchs with their juiceless loins would follow her about, hiding behind columns and round corners, slavishly panting. When she appeared in the room, as I was settling some petty thing, some mean quarrel between two nobodies, I would fall silent, open mouthed and slack, entirely abstracted. The plaintiff and his opponent could settle their fight with swords for all I cared.

You all know how she had her way with me. That was the zenith of her power, and it was after that famous dance that she became vain, mistakenly assuming that since she was captivating, she must also have been beautiful. She decided that she was perfect - delicate and seductive, a new Helen of Troy, the equal of Cleopatra. She began to think of herself as an agent, a person, a character. She had found her part in life's drama, and began to play it.

That was what destroyed her magic. When she became self-conscious, she created the distinction between mind and body, between ghost and machine, that she had lacked, and so she lost the quality that had made her so unique. All of a sudden, the workings of her mind were laid bare to me. Her vanities stood out like levers for anyone to push or pull, and by tweaking them this way and that, I could make Salome dance like a marionette. From that moment, she had no more hold over me.

I myself am vain. Everybody is - it's the inescabable consequence of having a personality at all. But I have learnt from her - vanity is a weakness. I try to keep mine hid.