by Tony Duvert
What had he been running away from, travelling from country to country? What was it, after all, that had so often made him abandon a capital city when he had already made such a striking beginning to a promising career? No, not the police, perhaps not, but…
Certain women, expert witnesses who were heard uncritically as soon as the talk turned to children, were able to give the impression that they knew quite a bit about it. Oh, a great deal. And if Jonathan hadn’t got friends in high places… Anyway, all you needed to know was who had bought the famous sadistic prints. Some of his clients were well known… No, not just touching up some little boy in a corner: up to a point, that wasn’t… No. Really quite unspeakable things.
It was a fine opportunity to be revenged upon the deserter. If he had only known how to do it, Jonathan could have cut a fine figure of a man, taking refuge in the countryside, far from the temptations of the world, like some superb genius of eighty-five. But he was too young, too much the subject of discussion. He hadn’ t the skill to organise from a distance that mixture of advertisement for his virtue and flattery of those who have none, without which such a retreat just gets you libelled and hated.
Apart from the ridiculous allusions to his disgusting habits, more odiously yet, they worked to ruin his relationships with his most important buyers. It was enough to tell them that Jonathan, during his rare visits to Paris, had told hurtful and compromising stories about them. An indiscreet and dangerous friend with whom it would be best to break off relations.
As the market in paintings is particularly artificial, young artists are interchangeable, and no one gets a foothold or makes further progress there without the carefully guided but ignorant rich having their part to play in it, this easy malice did Jonathan far more harm than any ‘revelation’ about his violent sexual tastes.
There was no plot. Chance, or very little more, had simply placed Jonathan among the steady flow of victims consumed by the gossip of tiny cliques. For some weeks, it was towards him that they directed the thousand darts of spite and bitterness thrown by those who dine and meet together for this purpose. No need for a cue: they’re all alike, they act in the same way, from afar they can smell the quarry that’s ripe for them, they pursue it together, abandon it together, forget their prey as quickly as they have chosen it, and their faces remain clear of the leprosy they spread.
But these cruelties in a tea-cup sometimes innocently strike their target. Jonathan’s dealer wrote to him to say that the situation was getting worrying. He had many of the previous year’s canvasses unsold; there was a slump, prices were falling, existing clients were cool, an overall feeling of animosity. Jonathan, said the dealer, should remember that his success depended in fact on a very few people; it was urgent that he should come to Paris to put a stop to this nonsense, which was beginning to turn out very badly.
Jonathan didn’t bother to reply. Without the letter, he would have known nothing; with it, he thought nothing. He’d never thought that his unwilling and relative success could last for long; and he’d no illusions about the narrow milieu within which art prospers, and dies. In the end, his future didn’t bother him.
Jonathan was tormented by something altogether different. For it was the height of summer, the first summer after Serge. When these days arrived, with the same colours, the same smells, the same limpid evenings, when the night sky was as pale as dawn, the young painter fell into a deep depression, interspersed only by flashes of pain.
He still hadn’t managed to kill himself (a living person’s idea, too optimistic a solution). Nor had he succeeded in rediscovering that state of innocence, of resigned insensibility, in which he’d been before meeting Serge.
He realised that these memories of the visit, which he thought about ceaselessly, helped him not to think about the new Serge: the boy would be nine years old now. Where was he spending the summer? With whom? Did he remember Jonathan?
Serge as he existed in Jonathan’s memory clearly didn’t correspond any longer to anyone in the world. And the other Serge, the one who existed, so far from here: Barbara’s child, the one who went to school, watched the telly, who heard only mothers, schoolmistresses and the children of idiots, was being monitored, measured, weighed and adjusted by the medical profession; the one who’d asked for three francs to buy a comic, had turned up his nose at his evening meal and praised school dinners, he was gauged, noted and profiled in state files. The one dully bellyaching because his wrists and ankles stuck out too naked from clothes become too small: this Serge, so likely, brought bitter tears when he dared imagine him. His memories of the boy could tolerate no future: none, at least, that happened far away from him, quite the opposite of what he had known, and hoped, and worshipped.
That same summer, Jonathan committed several indecent assaults.
Walks in the country calmed him down, but they were impossible around his own home. On the other hand, he’d discovered some pretty places on the other side of the town you went to by bus from the village. He would take a walk, now and then, starting off from there.
On the road, though, or on the river-banks, or at the edge of the fields, he would meet boys. They weren’t very rough, sometimes as old as eight or ten. Meeting them, Jonathan forgot his manners. He would greet them, smile and talk, enjoying their voices and gestures, the happy looks that brightened up their fine faces. He wanted to hug them, to touch those joyful legs, the backs of their necks, their forearms and their cheeks. Nothing simpler: but nothing so unimaginable. So Jonathan, limiting himself to a recognised invitation, sometimes put his hand low down on their bellies, when he wasn’t able to get himself away before.
The first victim was peeing in the hedge round a field of rabbit-hutches. The little boy was eight years old. When Jonathan passed, the boy, standing with his feet apart, preferred to turn and say hello rather than hide his cock and its long foreskin, the yellow jet zig-zagging through the air. Jonathan waited while the boy did up his shorts, then stopped, sat down, and chatted about nothing in particular, the way people do when they’re out for a walk.
Then the child crouched down right next to Jonathan, lying down on the ground; he took hold of the boy’s crutch, with a naive movement like cupping a hand about the feathery head of a dandelion. The child responded simply by dropping himself onto the ground and spreading his legs wide apart. He had a shy smile, a little distrustful, a little kind. He soon felt reassured. He carefully opened his shorts, where his cock was stiff. He didn’t seem surprised that Jonathan should kiss and lick the organs that appeared. After a well-mannered ‘Oh!’ he seized the young painter’s cock, so as politely to provide him with the movement that he himself experienced in the same place. And when Jonathan asked him, with a touch of hypocrisy, whether that bothered him, the child said simply:
‘No, I like that.’
At the end, Jonathan took his sex, hid it, pushed it into the grass, for fear the child should be surprised by his sperm. The lad ended up rubbing himself, then examined his willy as if waiting for something to happen. He pulled back at his foreskin, squinted at the urethra with its scarlet and salty depths, and then, as he was going soft, got dressed again.
He talked a bit about his life. He was as innocent and silly as a young kitten, and Jonathan was so disappointed he was ashamed to have touched him.
The boy’s body was different from Serge’s. He had a Nordic fairness, his flesh more yielding, his skin less soft, the cock shorter, more curved, more cushiony. And Jonathan felt the world rock as he travelled through space and time — towards his home, his country and his childhood twenty years before. The time of his first loves, when he was the same age.
The boy wasn’t at all curious about Jonathan. He talked stupidly about the rabbit-farm and the pleasure of killing. He often mentioned daddy, and said ‘It’s the holidays,’ and ‘The farm-dog, he’s a good ratter.’ These commonplaces filled Jonathan with disgust: he had no experience of ordinary children, the hollow children in fam
ilies.
‘It’s necrophilia,’ he thought to himself as he left.
This miserable bit of good luck left him unhappy; and he restrained himself a little before starting again.
He was astonished, too, that his unfashionable sexual tastes should lead in the end to the adventures of a potential daddy: shrewish mothers-in-law looking for a better son-in-law, stupid young women in bars, full-bosomed and empty-headed. The difference in age and sex between his loves and those that were allowed hardly counted for anything in the face of such damning similarities. You don’t change the world in changing the object of your desire: this society, however you look at it, has only got the one thing to offer.
Another walk. Two children, very well-built, dressed in swimming-trunks, catching frogs at the edge of a pond. Jonathan looked at the frogs, stored alive in a transparent plastic bag full of water. Jonathan and the boys were on their knees. Jonathan touched the velvety bulge of flesh at the waist of the one who was carrying the bag. The boy frowned and pulled away. Jonathan carried on talking about frogs, and the boy relaxed. The other one hadn’t seen the gesture. Jonathan started again, the boy got up suddenly, went to join his friend. They left together. Jonathan went on his way, calling to them as he went, shouting out:
‘You little shits!’
For these aggressions, without violence, even without distrust, produced no sense of guilt in him. He had visited many countries where such gestures are innocuous, and where lovemaking follows from such invitations as chance may bring one’s way; where a refusal is as pleasantly made as the request, for such things are commonplace, and flattering, after all. Such customs seemed to him to be more developed than those of Northern Europe, whose chaste children, far from being fragile innocents, were rather, in his opinion, doltish and retarded barbarians.
Another walk. On a weed-grown railway siding, two boys were having a look at an abandoned goods wagon.
One of them got up into it; the other stayed to keep a lookout; it was near a tiny railway station, perhaps itself abandoned. Jonathan approached, reassured the boys, got up into the wagon, saw the slender and big-bottomed one, aged ten or eleven, moving about in the shadow, and found him attractive. This shade gave him the Mediterranean idea of showing his sex. An invitation in the rustic manner, but too childish for the cold and well-trained children of this part of the world.
Apparently the boy, for his part, had never travelled, despite his curiosity for stationary railway wagons: Jonathan’s action terrified him.
Annoyed, dejected, suddenly brought back to where he was, the country he was in, Jonathan insisted; he threatened the child and ordered him to touch it.
The boy did this, trembling, and stuttering a whole string of ‘Yes, yes’ — as you do to show your fright in some dramatic scene from a play at the church youth-club, once the primary-school mistress and the priest have explained how you should look to express fear. But all he did, standing back, was to put out his index-finger to touch the young painter’s beautiful golden cock for a fraction of a second, as if it would bite him. This was so ridiculous that Jonathan, moved to pity, shrugged his shoulders, did himself up again, and let the child get down.
He followed him and said, mockingly:
‘Now that you’ve seen a Martian, you can go and tell your… your mates. You’ve been lucky! But careful: I’ve got my flying-saucer over there, behind the trees, and it’s jam-packed with green rays!’
The other boy, who stood at the side of the petrified victim, looked at Jonathan with the terrible brilliant eyes of an indignant judge, and didn’t say a word.
Braced by the terror, the young artist went unhurriedly on his way, waving two or three times to the immobile pair.
But this incident dissuaded him from ever again touching a child of France. The boy at the rabbit-farm had been an exception, an unlikely and insignificant chance. No use exposing himself again to the danger presented by parents’ children.
Any one of these assaults might have turned out badly: Jonathan would have been turned into a monster for the newspapers. Rejection of his solitude could only lead him there. He would fall into the trap, become one of those unfortunates turned upon by families, their newspapers and their cops. Become exactly what they want you to become, so that you humbly allow yourself to be destroyed by them. Child molester! Jonathan would not offer them the pleasure.
That autumn there came news from Paris which brought him back to life.
It was a letter from Simon, Serge’s father. Longwinded and unmalicious, the letter recounted that Simon had gdt together again with Barbara — abandoned by her American gang, and made no richer, it seemed, by her healing fluid than by her dreamy daubs in acrylic. She had started working half-time again as a secretary, and was thinking seriously about making a living of it. Simon realised that she would turn to him to support her, if it came to it; but he loved her, and that’s all that mattered. The architects’ office where he worked was doing a great trade in corrupt deals, with MPs, town councillors, the minister and the bank; it stank, he realised, but it would bring a rise, very handy now he was marrying Barbara. That’s what counts, after all, we only have one life. Yes, they were getting married properly, families there and all; they’d just have to wait for the rise, because there were problems finding some-where to live, for three of them. Because he absolutely had to have an office, and Barbara preferred separate rooms. Like that, you don’t get too used to each other, she was right, really.
So it would be the spring or summer, depending on the money.
There, just at the corner of the page, in the most ordinary way, Simon sent Serge’s regards to Jonathan, adding that the boy thought about him a lot and that he would very much like to visit him in the country again. Perhaps in the spring or the summer, said Simon, because, of course, after the wedding, a little honeymoon, just him and Barbara, without the kid… Yes, it would be nice. Obviously they wouldn’t spend their whole lives using Jonathan as a nanny; Simon was suggesting it because his son, my word, had a real soft spot for Jonathan. So if it wasn’t too much trouble — but we’ll see, of course, it was for him to decide, they did realise, and if the worst came to the worst there was always one of the grandmothers, but as for Simon, he really thought, etcetera.
He also valiantly reasserted his artistic ambitions (sculp-ture, more than anything); and he talked about what was going on, about up-and-coming artists.
Hardly had he deciphered the letter than Jonathan felt like dashing up to Paris. He went round and round in the house, read and re-read the sentence where Serge was thinking of him, laughed, called himself an idiot, opened a bottle, poured it away in the sink, cried though still laughing, stopped, stroked his hand as if it were the boy’s, ran into the garden, looked full of wonder at even the slightest dead leaf, came in again boiling hot, collapsed on a chair where, his eyes blurred with tears, he dropped the letter and experienced his joy in all its pain and all its purity.
In his mind’s eye he saw the house as it had been before. He saw each object anew, as if it was to be rediscovered and loved by another eye. There came to his ears a rough and penetrating voice, quick and delightful, with the song of a river rushing over stones, the sweet simplicity of lake-water. He made food, and set the table elaborately, as if a minute later there should appear the guest he would now be waiting for, each day and the next.
Given up to this childish happiness, he pushed away his plate, took some paper, and drew, as if for the front cover of a scandal magazine, this tremendous event, the arrival of Serge. Then he saw he could no longer produce the child’s face. He searched out his old drawings, looked at them, and as he did this, his joy died away.
If Serge came at Easter, it would be almost two years since those drawings. If he came in the summer, he would be a big boy of ten, a child he couldn’t imagine. A stranger, who carried in his memory, and in his heart, another stranger. Jonathan was afraid.
It was too late to catch the bus. If Jonathan
had wanted to go to Paris, he would have had to wait till the next day. But he was no longer thinking of going. He was held back by his fear of seeing Serge now grown older. It would be better to stay here, and wait until they brought the child.
Anyway, what would he have done up there? There would have been the same obstacles as before, even if Barbara, now preoccupied with a husband rather than a pre-pubescent pup, would cut back on her motherly demands.
Jonathan hadn’t heard from her for several months. He was afraid that the Parisian libels his dealer had told him about might have reached the young woman’s ears. She scarcely had an entrée to the private circles where that sort of thing prospered, but with her super-rich friends…
It must have been that they had become bored or disappointed with her. And as Simon, for his part, didn’t seem to have any suspicions, the de Sade affair couldn’t have got out. Or again, the dealer might have been exaggerating, and put a very black cast on the situation, just so as to be able to reduce the monthly payments he made.
After the anguish which came with the idea of a Serge unknown, Jonathan managed to reason with himself. It would be enough not to imagine anything, not to try to do anything, not to expect anything. To be there, to be ready. The future would be more easy, because there was Simon between Barbara and the child. With her narcissistic mania for throwing her viscous and grandiloquent love about everywhere, she actually loved no one; he really did love people, the poor failure. They would cancel each other out, and this would make Serge free.
With every day that passed, Serge would become stronger and more independent. With every day, if Jonathan was worthy of it, their friendship would grow in strength. Real life would no longer face problems. There would be no obstacle, in any case, which could not be assessed and overcome. The difficulties would no longer come from outside. Misfortunes, if such they were, would be no one’s business but their own, and would have a human scale. Rows, illnesses, accidents, whims, uglinesses, differences, impotence, bad-tempered discussions, irritation, wounds, and the passage of time: in short, happiness just as it comes.