by Tony Duvert
Before being a torturer, this son had been victim, at a time when his father was tough enough to lay down the law; he added the chilly cruelty of the virtuous to it. One day, when the eldest hadn’t gone to school (he isn’t the one who told me about it), his mom denounced him; tears, moans, hysterics. Today she’s less dramatic, because she has become too fat; but she still rolls around on the floor, which she’s nicely shaped to do. Her husband believed in public school as he did in God himself. He found a way to punish his son. He undressed him, tied him to a railing on the street, hit him with an army belt until his back, shoulders, waist and calves were bleeding. Then he bound the little boy’s hands, attached the rope to his bicycle and yanked the staggering, bleeding kid into a run all over the city. No passersby intervened: he was a father. After this torture, the mother had another fit because her little boy had been torn to pieces; according to her, his father was only supposed to hit the soles of his feet with a stick.
This father’s harshness didn’t prevent Francesco from describing him to me as good, friendly and fair; but it’s because he was talking about a dead man. Besides, Francesco himself was rarely beaten—his father was too old, his brother too young. As for the mom, during the twenty years that her ploy lasted, nothing could exhaust the flood of tears and hysterical convulsions torn out of her by the punishments that she herself had required. You can tell that the poor woman isn’t in it for nothing; it’s obvious how she suffers; during one of these sessions, the shrieks make the neighbors come running and feel sorry for her. Then the kid who’s been beaten comes out of the room in which the eldest was locked up with him. His limbs may be striped with wallops or his face bloated by bruises, but these ladies are too involved in their calamity to pour just a little water over them. This is the hour of motherly triumph, and they don’t need children now. Moreover, being accustomed to the order of things makes the boys consider it humiliating to receive any aftercare.
Brutal punishments are the rule, and teachers and bosses are as devil-may-care about it as the parents. One evening I took a very gentle, well-behaved child I knew to the clinic to get stitches. He was working for a shopkeeper, a fat man with crooked legs, and accidentally bumped into an oil lamp, without knocking it over. The shopkeeper felt afraid and cured himself of it by chasing and hitting the kid with an iron bar, and then, yanking him by the hair, hammered his face with his own skull, which burst open one eyebrow and a cheek.
The theme of my friends’ reproaches about my tastes weren’t about small boys being asexual creatures that had to be protected from desire, but about their being too little of anything to be loved. The kindness I showed the little ones was disconcerting, as if I’d been seen giving up my bed to a dog, pouring it champagne and covering it with gold. Even those who felt a little affection for the children treated them despite themselves like an inferior race, something below the rank of women and above the donkey, or should I say below. They had the same disdain for their childhood and remained astonished, for example, that I saw great value in some old photo that they’d indifferently left for me.
Francesco tried in vain to take part in some little get-togethers I’d have. At my place children felt at ease; it was all about pleasure, and visits left them satisfied; they drank, ate, left with round stomachs and full pockets. They told their buddies that I had a great ass. But when Francesco was with me, they no longer allowed the slightest touch. Shame about getting it on with a local boy and fear of the older ones were mixed up in this refusal; no sweet talk could convince them; the long, pleasurable conversations with Francesco, his lack of defensiveness, seemed more suspect than anything to them; they remained convinced that you only wanted to catch them off guard and rape them.
“You see, they’re stupid,” Francesco would remark sourly. I suggested he give them a smack to make them intelligent. He’d hang his head, but it was only to please me that he showed disapproval he didn’t feel in the face of such bad treatment.
Children’s ordeal—temporary, of course—came instead from the fact that they had nobody to put under them. Cats run fast, dogs are few and far between, mothers protect the littlest ones. Going one-on-one with each other is dangerous; it’s better to join forces. There were gangs of them everywhere, and it wasn’t always for playing football or protecting themselves from the older ones. I got a kick out of a fight with stones that I once saw (among boys eight to ten years old), because after a few throws hit their mark and caused tears, the warriors lined up far enough away to keep them from reaching one another. But the fight went on for a long time. The stones were only insults, a volley of bad intentions that were lost in the dust.
I found that even the softest of the adolescents had contempt for the little ones. His name was Andrès, he was a friend of Francesco, sixteen, rather skinny and short, who dressed like a little pretty boy: sharp clothes, long, beautiful black hair falling down to his shoulders along a pleasant, bony face; with the gangly look of a runt trying to act like a man without having the build for it. He was crazy for men. He was too shy to look for them and preferred to rely on chance or the lovers of his friends. If you paid for it, he did it for the money; if you didn’t pay, he just did it. He was attracted to me and I less to him; he didn’t ask for money or presents. He was overflowing with silly virtues and with vices that were even cuter. I met him one morning at a square. He’d spent the money order he got from an old friend who was very generous. He was extremely well dressed, had on good shoes and every hair was miraculously in place; with shoulders thrown back, he was nonchalantly exhibiting a new tape recorder to two or three dirty, slovenly children covered in black pieces of cloth that were in tatters; with their heads shaved and their feet bare, they looked like convicts a month after their escape. I went up to him, the kids in rags took off, we went for a drink and I asked him who the little ones were. He shrugged.
“Oh, they’re my brothers.”
Obviously, he was the eldest. I never understood why the kids were in such a state, since his family wasn’t as poor as Francesco’s, none of whose brothers were dirty or wore clothes in shreds.
There was a thirteen-year-old kid from the streets who was crude but pleasant and whom I liked a lot and sometimes invited home, though it wasn’t at all easy. He had a heavy, fleshy prick with large balls, an attractive, welcoming tush, a long scar on his forearm. I wanted to know what it was. He said that a big guy had fought with him to get a few pennies and had ended up using a knife. Obviously, the boy wasn’t very happy about it. When I asked him, without dwelling on it, whether he’d be capable of doing the same thing later to a little kid, he took his time, stared off into space, scratched his knee, lit up with a happy smile as if he were dreaming and said: yes.
He also had several short, jagged older scars on his shins; once his father, who was a bricklayer, had punished him with a trowel. That man was dead; the new father, a very poor man who sold vegetables, was so gentle that the three boys who were the other’s sons (mine was the eldest) were now totally at their liberty, were truant from school, panhandled, misbehaved, hung out in the city until midnight and after.
I should also lose my illusions about the severe conditions I’ve been describing. In the prison-like life of a child in our country, they’re hair-raising; but here the context is completely different. First of all, life is hard on the body. Eating, sleeping, working, getting from place to place, performing daily tasks—these are typically uncomfortable and full of trouble. You develop a resistance to illness, to accidental injuries. You communicate, express yourself with very intense physicality; but even so, there’s nothing vicious or excessive about ordinary relations. Outbursts of violence occur within a world hardened to suffering, but causing very little anguish.
Besides, these violent incidences are rare. Long periods without any cruelty follow. Defying certain taboos provokes fierce reprisals, but people aren’t ever guilty of the thousands of offences at home with which prejudice and repression poison every hour of the lives of chil
dren in our country.
In the street, the cafes, movie theaters, shops, little kids are treated as equals. They go out on their own, hang out where they want like everybody else. They spend their time off with one another, meet up, laugh, run, bicker, tell what’s going on with them, study in small groups, have fun with everything and nothing, never being forced to confine themselves to places reserved for children; they live outside freely, and there’s no adult keeping his eye on them to “emcee” or control their pleasures, leisure, friendships or bodies. They’re not afraid of strangers, go out at night alone or in groups, are as curious as cats, love to blab, to be surprised, to create situations that are fun or a turn-on or that put them in a good light; and since putting them to work at a young age leads to their rubbing shoulders with adults, they spread their vitality, happy-go-lucky attitude and mischievousness to those places, brightening up the most morbid workshops and filling them with their explosive laughter.
When I first came to the city, I got a kick out of a little show. In an attractively kept traffic circle in a new neighborhood full of shade and flowers, a policeman was directing some light traffic. Two little boys come to a stop under his eyes and piss on the flowers. These are school kids with their book bags; they’re laughing, messing around, and one of them aims a thick spray of urine at the other. The one who gets sprayed pulls away, splatters himself; the sprayer holds back the last of it and scampers after him as he finishes pissing. People passing by don’t say a word or do a thing; neither does the policeman. The prankster has gotten his clothes too undone; he arches his back, pushes everything down to his thighs and carefully puts his trousers back on. Then they leave, as merry as they’d come. Nothing there that’s anything to see or describe.
In a French family that lived for a while in my building, a thirteen-year-old boy was slapped and locked in for the day because his father had seen him from the balcony running on the sidewalk for about twenty feet along a garden fence. I told you not to run, he shouted, get up here. This child and his little brothers were nice, energetic boys. But this is how they were being raised, and everything I noticed about it made me turn purple with rage. A normal upbringing and an ordinary father. Nothing here, either, to say or describe.
During heat spells, the crews splash around in the fountains of the old city the whole day; the boys set their shoes afloat, splash about, splatter the streets with water. Thirsty, they eye the outdoor cafes as they pass by, and if they see a carafe on the table they go up to it and are given a glass of water. They gulp it down, and off they go. They also drink from the water faucets at gas stations or from sprinklers.
Living around everyone makes the children considerate of others; they’re calm and can show restraint, but without repressing their physicality and anything that pops out of it that is out of the ordinary, fast-moving and loud.
The street and city space belong to them. They sail through it so well and are so thoroughly familiar with it that they turn it into a village. It’s not a uniform bunch; but the poor kids possess the same dignity as others; the old people here impose themselves in their way just as the children do in theirs; no one bothers the disabled, they’re involved in everything, no pointless consideration is shown them, nor is any revulsion; all day long the beggar population walk around without the slightest embarrassment. But there are so many children and adolescents, and they are so good-looking, that when I’m there as a people watcher, I start believing there’s no one else but them; it’s even too much to take in. They’re beaming with health, and have few bodily defects—squinting, limping, obesity, bad proportions, skin-and-bones physiques, rotten teeth—are very rare.
Small businesses are ready for little people; they cater to their tiny resources with packages of chewing gum, cigarettes, etc. The grocer slits loaves of bread and fills them with jam, hands out glasses of milk and a thousand sweet or salty treats priced low; everything possible is laid out in a child’s proportions. In the parks, they walk everywhere, sit down and lie everywhere, climb trees, move as much and make as much noise as they want (a few of the guarded parks are calmer). Even school has this easy quality about it since it isn’t too mandatory.
Thus, the harshness, the inferiorities that impact the life of a child have their compensations. Tranquility, respect, pleasures, considerable tolerance mitigate them. Family life and community are interdependent; you share the two and circulate between them to the benefit of the latter, from the youngest age. You set right in one what causes you pain in the other, creating a balance between pleasure and suffering. In this way, the contempt suffered by kids doesn’t harm them or cut back on their freedom; they’re not kept apart from the life of the collective; their misdeeds, or what are considered to be such, are punished, but their autonomy is accepted and anticipated everywhere; and the violence they endure at least has the advantage of reducing to a few brutal events that educational oppression that adults in our country inflict upon every aspect of their relationship with children.
I’m walking by a run-down movie theater. In the hallway that serves as the lobby is a young orange-and-gray cat with a long, slender neck. It’s lying there but not asleep. The tile floor is extremely clean. An enormous cockroach is scurrying quickly around the place. The cat’s attentive eyes open, it brings its snout closer, rises, drags the cockroach toward it with one dart of its paw and puts it gently into its mouth; it crunches into it with delicate movements of its jaw. The hindquarters of the insect wriggle at the very center of the cat’s mouth, which looks like it is innocently sucking on a piece of black licorice. It gives me a surprised but unruffled look, finishes nibbling on the treat without spitting a crumb of it back out. Then the cat lies down again. I wonder if cockroaches taste good, because cats are dainty eaters. Unless it’s rancid. Maybe the cockroach smells like an old fish, an unwashed prick, stale pussy. We like those odors on ourselves well enough, less often on others. As for eating it, shrimps and smoked herring are a bit like that, as are some cheeses, which smell like decomposing urine, and tripe or andouille sausage, which are macerated in shit. We don’t deny ourselves anything.
Cats around here are happy, as far as cats go. They multiply rapidly. The old city is overrun with them. You see them at night in deserted alleys, roaming quietly in packs, looking for food among the trash dumped in front of the houses, which the garbage collectors pick up at dawn. If it weren’t done that way, there’d be no more cats. They’re beautiful, healthy-looking animals of various colors, and none of them are emaciated. Bold, wild, they barely let themselves be touched, but they like it when you look at them and they study you for a long time. Sometimes people carry off one of their kittens for the amusement of a young child at home. These kittens are puny and seem less well fed where they’re given meals than they are where garbage is dumped. When the kitty has grown a little, they put it back outdoors, if it hasn’t bit the dust—because they aren’t placed where they are for the purpose of teaching children to be gentle. These playthings become as unsociable as the other cats and are probably more so.
I had no intention of talking about cats, but it came into my mind all by itself. However, I ought to stay away from animals, the human race and general concepts; this is a pornographic book I’m writing, all it needs is cocks.
Andrès the pretty boy’s was mediocre or average, and something about it turned me off for some unexplained reason; if it got hard, what I saw was a turd without details, molded straight, and as hard as a meal of pebbles. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was ugly, but individual tastes about such things are sometimes subjective. I was so little interested in it that it might as well have not existed; happily, Andrès took care of it himself with a great deal of affection; he was always stroking it.
Like the bird-catcher, he narrates his pleasures with images. At his place he keeps an old issue of Paris Match in which there’s an ad for underpants and an article on sports, rugby or something like that (it reminds me of the pornography I was already trying to get hold o
f when I was barely a teenager). If he feels lonely, he slips it under his sweater, goes to the john, locks himself in and looks at the good pages while he jerks off. I ask him what he thinks of. Innocently, he reports that he imagines meeting that good-looking athlete, or the man in the underpants; and they talk and kiss and touch each other and then go where they need to and do such and such—he doesn’t like to tell the details.
Andrès’s solitary ritual impresses me; his homosexual fantasies in the toilet are quite exotic for the mentality of a boy from the city. These are bourgeois morals. When he told me about them, he was in confidential mode; he’d never admit directly that he liked to look at men, those made of flesh and blood.
His reputation was bad enough already. His friends made fun of him and looked down on him; homosexuals who were like him but more hidden, such as Franceso, crushed him with sarcasm and were happy to spread the worst gossip to make themselves look innocent. Friendship doesn’t hold up when it’s a matter of saving face, because here, seeming and living are one and the same thing. The cruelty displayed by the poor teenagers around here, the feeling of inferiority that makes them sacrifice everything to social conformity, is horrible to witness. Andrès was the dumping ground for the vices others were absolved of; putting him down was an orthodox duty.
So they claimed that he’d play bottom for the men of the city, the ultimate degeneracy. He wasn’t the only one, but he must not have made enough of a secret of it. It seems that, to punish him, one day a hunky young man invited him to step away with him; Andrès says OK and ends up getting pronged. Then the hunk’s buddies show up, and each of them fucks Andrès so that he’ll understand once and for all that it was taboo. There were forty of them. I obviously don’t believe the figure, but its a commonplace kind of thing: a butt that’s been had attracts the young bachelor crowd like a honey pot draws flies. The guilty one gets named, talked about, they go to him when they need to get off, and sometimes they don’t take no for an answer; it would be dreadful if he refused, since he’s already broken in. Foreign fags have the same status, but since they’re adults, well off, and since they’re hoping to get money from them, they’re shown some consideration.