When Jonathan Died

by Tony Duvert

  When the provisions were exhausted, the lemonade swal­lowed and the reading well under way, the inhabitant of the T relaxed his behaviour. First of all he gave up the canonical posture of the child tucked up in bed. He pushed back the sheets, turned onto his side, or on his stomach, his feet towards the pillow. The pyjamas he always wore were annoy­ing him — the weather was warm — he murmured:

  ‘It’s hot isn’t it? I’m hot, I am!… I’ll put it on later,’ and having unbuttoned himself and taken down his trousers (more or less preserving his modesty by putting in the right place a sleeve or the corner of some clothing left lying on the bed), he started to read again. As soon as this was done, Jonathan, who himself continued to sleep naked, felt entitled to throw back his own sheets — his big book serving to cover his loins.

  ‘Those six pieces of paper, they’re all the same picture. What a view! It’s the moon, of course. There’s nothing to explain. It’s not really a story, but it’s more beautiful. Don’t you think? I like to look at them! Those I look at a lot! But not now.

  ‘You have to see them all at the same time, otherwise it’s not as good.

  ‘There were enough elephants! If only I could draw them differently, at least. But always pointing left!…

  ‘The boy is here, on the moon. He’s looking at the ground. There’s nothing there for him to eat. He’ll have to go down again. Can you imagine if you had to go all that way to buy things to eat. But all the same…

  ‘He’s going hunting. He hasn’t got a gun, so he can’t catch birds. He’s looking in the grass, it’s very long. It’s as tall as he is.

  ‘Those are the animals he finds. They’re vegetables with shoes on. A big potato. A leek. More potatoes. They’re run­ning fast. They’re frightened.

  ‘He’s caught a potato, and he eats it on a skewer. And he can use the shoes for himself, that’s handy.

  ‘Then he has a nap. There’s a rocket leaving the earth. They’re going to look for them. It’s like before. He never gets a rest.

  ‘The noise wakes him up, he’s going to hide. But he falls into a hole. It’s full of cracks, the moon. He’s falling. Don’t look any further! First of all, tell me what you think there is at the bottom.’

  And there were the night-time walks, each of them carrying an electric torch. Then the ungrateful countryside became beautiful; and you felt you could do anything.

  Jonathan knew the neighbourhood well, the lanes, the fields, the streams and woods, so they needn’t worry about getting lost. But Serge had no intention of being taken on a guided tour. Soon over-excited, especially when they reached a patch of forest, he escaped from Jonathan and went explor­ing. He wasn’t nervous; he soon communicated his enthusi­asm to Jonathan, for whom the magic of the forest and the night had long ago died out — but who got so involved again that he ended up being frightened of the dark himself, as soon as he no longer saw the boy’s light dancing in the dark.

  Serge enjoyed a kind of hide-and-seek. He said:

  ‘You go that way and I’ll go this way. Then we walk up to a thousand. You don’t have to count all the numbers really. You just go on until the time. Then we turn back. But you mustn’t hide the lamp. And the first one to see, wins.’

  The boy had the cunning to climb a tree. He let Jonathan disappear, then ascended through the branches to the height where you sway about and you can see the stars, then the whole sky. The air was cool, up there! Then, in a very loud voice, he called for Jonathan, but he had put out his lamp, which was attached to a loop on his trousers by a piece of string.

  After a while, Jonathan approached, a little disoriented, not very sure about the shouts. Serge didn’t see his lamp, didn’t even hear his footsteps; but the young man’s voice was clear.

  ‘Well, where am I then?’ Serge cried, enchanted, as he dis­covered his victim within a few yards of the tree.

  Some rocky outcrops with little caves, a clean-enough stream reached by climbing two fences and slipping under­neath some barbed wire, served as locations for similar games. Serge didn’t give up until he was really tired, and it was only then that he suggested they should return home. It might be eleven o’clock, or midnight. There would often be ,a long way to walk back, getting lost and finding the way again. The boy would drag his feet a bit, but he was never less than cheerful. He was making up ideas for tomorrow evening.

  ‘It was an ordinary town, with cars. Just that! It was very strange for it to be there, wasn’t it!

  ‘You know, they’re not real stories, because I don’t write anything. It’s to do the drawing. And there’s some that aren’t very good, I haven’t put them in. But they’re getting better. At the beginning they were all like that.

  ‘Did you do stupid pictures? When you were small?’

  If Serge’s manner was now very affectionate, and sometimes very demonstratively so, he had however become less so­ciable. Children his own age hardly attracted his attention now; as for adults, he never looked at them. He said nothing about his parents; from time to time there would be word of them, a postcard; for a few moments his expression would cloud over, or become absent, then he seemed to forget all about it.

  His curiosity about Jonathan grew. He demanded stories, wanted to know all about his life. Jonathan did what he was told, said what he could. He found this horrible. He liked neither to lie nor to simplify; he had to.

  The young boy’s beauty also troubled Jonathan, and he couldn’t get used to it. He hoped it would be fleeting; he sometimes thought, with a certain sadness, of the Serge he knew before, who did not strike the eye, or who wasn’t beautiful, like this one, apart from, or in addition to himself.

  This impression kept Jonathan shy. He never dared to take the initiative in their couplings. He almost regretted that they had taken place. He had an infinite need of them. Without Serge’s kindliness, his ease and his vulgar greed, those mo­ments would have been hard to bear.

  They had always fucked a bit. This is what had astonished Jonathan when in Paris he’d slept alongside the child — then hardly seven years old — who would turn his back on him and go to sleep with his bottom pressed into the hollow of the young man’s thighs, both of them curled up together. In the morning he would regain the position, and once, without saying a word, he slipped his hand behind him, took the sex that lay along the divide of his buttocks, and moved his hips so as to put it just at the hole. Jonathan didn’t dare move, and pretended to be still asleep. But that very evening, when they were in bed and had indulged in various caresses, they were again in the same position; and Jonathan, as the boy’s hole was still wet with saliva, pushed in his sex. He had not imagined it so elastic. When he had gone in about the length of a finger, he heard Serge, his voice calm, murmur simply:

  ‘That hurts a bit.’

  He withdrew straight away, and would not start again. The disproportion terrified him, although Serge, for his part, seemed quite unaware of it.

  Later, the child repeated the gesture. Jonathan understood better then the pleasures of this little body. He didn’t pene­trate, or hardly, but in this way masturbated the anus at length, until he flooded it, then wiped it dry, unless Serge demanded, as he did on some later occasions, with placid tyranny:

  ‘No, you must carry on when it’s wet.’

  The thing was part of their routine, without occupying a privileged place. As for Serge, after various low and hesitant provocations, he had found means to amuse himself with the young man’s bottom, although for orgasms he relied on his hands.

  So, for a long time this sodomy had been mixed up with other pleasures; among them, it was nothing special, it went unnoticed. Only the child’s growing up, or the length of their intimacy, had gradually modified the nature of the penetra­tions — much deeper, but still almost static, on Jonathan’s part; more skilful, less facetious, longer and more solidly implanted, on Serge’s.

  A development which continued through that summer. But an outside event had also intervened. In fact, Serge told J
onathan that a little while before the holidays, he’d sucked a boy of fifteen — who had also fucked him, without reserve. It was one of the crowd of men and girls of all ages, more or less, who used to visit Barbara’s. The suggestion, abrupt, had come from the teenager; Serge had agreed without fuss. Nothing came of it; the elder boy, having done his bit, must have got the jitters, and had never set foot in the house again.

  This story left Jonathan perplexed. He hadn’t imagined that Serge could have done such a thing; the child spoke of it disdainfully, with a laugh in his voice — all the people who hung around with Barbara were idiots. He was, however, just a tiny bit proud of what had happened, Jonathan could see it clearly. But the false notions the young painter still enter­tained about children, despite himself, prevented him from being able to interpret and understand the event.

  Nor did he conclude that now Serge would be willing to go further than before, that his desires might be more focussed, nor that he might take bolder initiatives. In this he was wrong.

  It wasn’t a question of pleasures that Serge loved for love of Jonathan; he sought them out for themselves. When he thought of Jonathan, he hugged him; when he thought of cock or arse, he used it. It was this carefreeness which enabled Jonathan to bear these encounters, which otherwise would have so intimi­dated him as to force him to give them up. As Serge passed without transition, without any signal, according to whim, from what was ‘sexual’ to what was not, and vice versa, and liked to deal with the young man as if he, on his side, had no actual personal desires of his own, Jonathan was cast down and comforted in turn, unhappy at being alone in his desire, glad no longer to be so, sexed or unsexed according to the unpredictable motions of the child, of whom he was himself no more than the place, flesh and mirror.

  ‘It’s the people in the town who are special. They’ve only got heads and feet. I did lots and lots of heads like that. They haven’t any shoes. They’re as big as him. You realise, the heads are as big as that, at least! You’d be in the street, and hey, look! Wouldn’t you be frightened?

  ‘But they’re not dangerous, look. They seem to be fed up. They’re not paying any attention to him. There are arms instead of ears. Like the dogs there that have got long ones, really long. You can’t see if there are any women, I should have put them, eh, it would have been good!

  ‘That one you can see from the back, like me before. You see, he hasn’t got a neck, that’s his bottom down there. They don’t wear clothes.

  ‘They’re just ideas, I don’t know where I get them.

  ‘How d’you do, how d’you do! They all take each other’s ears, uh, their hands. What if I said hello to you like that. Hello there mate! Aah!

  ‘The cars haven’t got any wheels either. There are shoes again, big boots, clogs. You’d only have to give them ears and tails and you’d have animals.’

  Serge has Jonathan’s head on his thighs, lying there like a curled-up cat. First of all he touches it, scratches at it, strokes it. Then he starts to scratch a bit too much, to wobble it up and down, to tickle the ear with a hair. Jonathan gives up and gets onto his feet. Perhaps it’s better.

  Serge empties the shopping basket, and reads the label on the toilet-paper.

  ‘Four hundred centimes to wipe your bum,’ he shouts out, ‘That’s expensive by the hour!’

  Jonathan is disconcerted by this complex arithmetic, but Serge is probably right. A long exercise in mental arithmetic while making the meal.

  ‘He’s found a machine to escape, it’s a machine with pedals and steam-pipes, but really, to make it work you have to talk into that loudspeaker there. Then that wheel goes round, that makes the chain go round, and so on. He’s not sitting down properly. What he’s discovered is that if he says dirty words, the machine goes very very fast. If he says ordinary words, it doesn’t go fast. He drives it with the pedals. He’s shouting.

  ‘He must have said something really dirty, it’s flying now. I didn’t do it the same again. Just think of copying it all. That’s the smoke it makes with the dirty words. He knows a lot!

  ‘He’s out of the hole, he’s flying out again. But the rocket has seen him, it’s following. He’s thinking, it was silly of me to come out. He hasn’t even got a helmet to get back to earth. You see, on the moon he can breathe without anything, but it doesn’t help, he can’t leave.

  ‘There are pointed mountains like those down there. He’s flying over the top. The rocket hasn’t noticed and it crashes into them. Bang! He’s really happy.

  ‘He’s not saying any more dirty words, and the machine is coming down. Down there, there are trees you can eat, like for the captain, in fact, who…

  ‘I’m always doing things the same, that’s why I stopped. I prefer to do things that don’t exist. All the trees where you eat. The things to eat I cut them out and then I glued them in the trees, they’re adverts, there was all that in a fridge!’

  Serge was astonishingly active. His productions multiplied everywhere; Jonathan understood how they had been able, a century earlier, to get kids to work a twelve- or thirteen-hour day in the factory. It was impossible to imagine a more generous source of energy. Except that just as he expended his energy with such reckless prodigality, he refilled himself with food, the way coal is fed to a railway engine. If he had two hands to work at something, he seemed to have a third to eat at the same time.

  The little garden had become a landscape worthy of the drawings on the papyrus. The colours even looked like water­colour. To go from the kitchen door to the garden gate, you now crossed a whole countryside with all its numerous features of landscape. But it was a pity to see it from the plane, at the height of an adult’s head; it had been created on all fours, and it was on all fours that it needed to be travelled through. And the roads, although excellent — very smooth to the touch — were very narrow for big knees like Jonathan’s.

  ‘Afterwards, I said to myself, well, that’s good! To glue things, see.

  ‘To cut things out and mix them up with the drawings. I did all that there. The black and white ones I coloured.’

  But how short these two months were. Serge hardly liked any longer to get on with things by himself. Jonathan was taken on as a labourer. He was asked for his advice on a technical problem; otherwise, he was given the boring tasks that a bigger body did better. Serge kept the design and the fiddly bits for himself.

  And finally, every three or four hours, Jonathan would be taken to a corner, to serve the needs of the ‘warrior’s rest’. These pauses were short and simple: Serge would want to be sucked and masturbated; he masturbated the young man at the same time, for the pleasure of seeing the skin slide up and down on the big cock. And Serge, as soon as he had his own orgasm, would say, without batting an eyelid:

  ‘That’s it. Stop now!’

  Jonathan would stop. Flies were done up again. Jonathan, for his part, wasn’t concerned to have an orgasm or not. They turned back to other physical activities which had the advan­tage of not coming to an abrupt end because of an orgasm. It might be said that in the economy of his days, Serge was successively solicited by one part of his body or another, and satisfied each according to its requirements. Certain parts, such as the legs or eyes, were almost insatiable; others like the cock or the stomach were easy to satisfy with a simple gesture, hour after hour; as for the traffic of the anus, turds or cock, its short duration was compensated for by its intensity.

  This distribution of the child’s activities reminded one of a farmer, who was obliged, from morning to night, to provide food for innumerable animals. Cows, pigs, ducks, pigeons and hens, the geese to be crammed, the lambs to be fussed over, the pullets to be fattened on rice pudding, greenery for the rabbits, saucers for the cats, salad things for the tortoises, flies for the chameleon, mice for the boa constrictor — then the horse to be rubbed down, the giraffe to be combed, the elephant to be showered, dogs to be patted, bikes to be greased, flowers to be watered, the dead to be buried, croco­diles to be tickled and wha
les to be soothed to sleep. This made up an immeasurable body, around which the young boy bustled about indefatigably. His body, the world itself.

  ‘I like that, geography. It’s what I like best. I’ve got all the maps. I saw some in a shop, in 3-D, for the mountains. They’re plastic, you can see everything. You could put water, where all the rivers are. I didn’t try, I haven’t got any. But I think you could!

  ‘That’s what it’s for, you see, the drawing. To do the same thing. It’s just France, with the Loire, the Seine, the Garonne, the Rhone, the Rhine. And the little ones that go into them, d’you know the names? You don’t do you! …I know them. Because I learn them.

  ‘It’s not 3-D like they do, I don’t know how. They have pictures on top, that’s the thing. You know, I’ve done heaps. But I’ve only put that one out, because it’s the best.

  ‘It goes with the other drawing, it’s the same colour. It’s when he’s eaten, he sleeps, he wakes up, it’s Earth! Yes, it was a dream. It was to get him back there, I didn’t know how. You can say, it’s people dreaming, they think things are happen­ing to them, and then afterwards it’s not true! Like that it works. It does, doesn’t it, more or less. But that doesn’t matter. It’s only because you’re going to tell me you can’t understand anything.’

  ‘But you’ll come to Paris, won’t you? You’ll come?

  Jonathan shrugged his shoulders in embarrassment: ‘Your parents, if they see me… Especially your mother.’ ‘I know.’

  Since he’d discovered Barbara’s misdeeds, Serge had been wondering. Most of all, he found it difficult to understand his mother’s tactics. As soon as Serge and Jonathan met, the woman’s lies were worth nothing; so why had she uttered them? Jonathan had his own ideas about it, but they weren’t easy to explain to the child. In the first place, Barbara was frivolous: she acted, reacted, with the structures of the world, with things and people, each day as it came. She was then a good liar, and easy to deceive herself.