by Tony Duvert
That’s how he tells it. But he really could have reacted in that way. First of all, he’s crazy about watches; secondly, he gets hard very easily. What threw cold water on the two of them, as it’s expressed around here, was obviously the fact of being together. The shiny object dazzled Francesco, he forgot about his inhibiting partner and immediately his rod sprang up, which is what it usually does without any prompting or any reason as soon as he takes it out. We need other kinds of stimuli, or screens, when something in bed turns us off. But with Francesco (and with most of the boys in this city), cocks seem independent of any sexuality and have an organic life below that of desire. Often when we’re eating or chatting, he pulls it elegantly from his pants, fully hard, the way you’d take a party whistle and blow into it to amuse your host; his always hard big prick is a good practical joke that he never tires playing on everybody, a source of perpetual laughter, a mischievous animal attached to his belly that couldn’t care less about the outside environment and the human being that lives on it as a parasite; it wakes up or sleeps at whim. Conversely, in an erotic situation, the member and the man reassociate; Francesco’s stages of erection follow what he’s feeling, and even depict his many variations in mood, minute by minute, with a faithfulness that’s affecting and voluble.
Whenever I’d come before him and staying inside him bored me, according to our rules of selfishness, I’d pull out and stick in a finger or a few, instead. He’d squeeze his anus around them to the point of almost breaking the bones and jerk off for dear life. One time, curiosity led me to slide a finger in with my cock when it was kind of soft. He has a roomy hole, and he liked it. He felt very sticky, but not dirty. I explored the area around my member, tickled the glans with my finger and was enjoying it a lot. Francesco sprayed a load on himself as he followed my game.
The transformations of his face weren’t reduced to the metamorphosis I’ve just described. The expressiveness of his features was amazing, and since he was childish, he’d screw up his face for a laugh and make others laugh all the time. He showed me every imaginable face, every attitude, every type of person, every disability, age, feeling, every kind of conventional mugging that women and men consider useful to flaunt their sexual identity. Some of these caricatures make you laugh to the point of tears, others are tiresome, which is usually the case with clowns.
I discovered that his simple, natural, usual expressions were as much a put-on as the others. The teenager I knew who appealed to me was actually only a teenager who was a master at imitating unaffected adolescence. The faith he inspired in me was brief. In a few days of notes of two or three lines that I’d scribbled on a calendar, I can already find my first suspicious or disappointed remarks. But I preferred to forget about them. I liked Francesco’s character, he was charming, perfect, very unexpected in this city (nor had I met anyone like him anywhere else); nor would I have called his machinations simple trickery designed to get money out of me. The thousand roles Francesco played, his thousand poses, the thousand lies he spun around me served, as a whole, only to help him live with the least unhappiness possible, given his identity.
The pleasure he gave me, my need of him, helped to make up for the breaches in his character. I avoided interpreting the inadequacies in his amiable funny-faces because I needed them. I was a starving, enthusiastic spectator, and I fed on him, changed by way of him, and if he hadn’t gratified me so much, I would never have become free enough to deconstruct the illusion he created.
Since childhood, he’d been able to perfect his affections, good behavior, cheerfulness on a lot of men, learning how to please adults, avoid their violence, coerce their egoism, produce an impression that was strong enough to make them ignore the part of it that was phony. Cheating was his immediate mode of expression, and he was never more spontaneous than when he told a whopper of a lie, never more appealing to see and hear. Unless you saw him intimately for a long time, it was impossible to suspect.
Like a lot of promiscuous types, I’m lenient with those I frequent and don’t take a strong line with them; they relax freely with me—but my scrutiny doesn’t relax at all. I don’t let on to what I notice (it would change what’s being shown to me), so people think I show a blind eye, whereas it’s my passion for observation that makes me so neutral. I take those who attract me as they come, don’t ask them to make adjustments in the direction of what I like about them, which is often very far—too far—from what they think they are and seem. When I observed Francesco, I was underhanded, indirect, like a man who goes into a movie theater not to see the film but, for example, to take cover from being tailed. Then the film fascinates him despite himself, and when he has to leave the theater, he regrets it doubly: for the security he’s experienced and for the show itself.
Francesco’s act got old quickly; he was aging, turning into an adult, his routine had stopped suiting him, the mask was becoming too tight and no longer held to his face. I’d already discovered that face, was curious about it but didn’t like it, accepted it only because of this mask it wore. Francesco was looking desperately for another. He’d tried living as a hetero, then a hippie, a trendy yuppie, a rebel, a drunk, a delinquent, a fairy in a relationship, an honest and determined worker, a good son, a useful friend, without finding anything that worked, that was as rich in resources, as adaptable as the graceful image of an adolescent that he was no longer able to pull off.
Therefore, despite our affair, the boy I call Francesco was the most imaginary of the boys I’m talking about. I created him with what he simulated for me. What I guessed about him, and which the fineness of his features helped him misrepresent so well, repulsed me, and interested me only for the unreality with which the actor, whose previous performances I’d admired, endowed it.
His face of a star during intercourse was a particular failure founded on a misunderstanding. If I’d told him that the face was hideous, he would never have made it again. But if there was only a single chance that it was involuntary, I wasn’t going to risk hurting him. So I never spoke to him about it, he didn’t suspect my disgust and thought of this “attractive” face as an infallible seduction trick every time he put it on.
Francesco’s unsuccessful faces. When the eldest boy threatens that he’d better not play any tricks on him, Francesco lowers a spiteful weakling’s face. That expression isn’t “his.” When he becomes ill at ease as a policeman passes by: no fear, but a kind of shrinking, a thug with a cowardly expression caught in the act and thinking about giving up his accomplice to save himself. His arrogance and foolhardy sarcasm, when he’s feeling powerful because he’s with his friends, has had a bit to drink and has just gotten what he wanted from me. The victorious laugh of a con man who’s leading an imbecile around by the end of his nose.
His hatred for his young brothers, the way his face looks when he speaks to them, are so brutal that he frightens me. He knows about my passion for children, but he underestimates it as much as he disdains them. He doesn’t think about holding back, nor that his tone of voice, gestures, features project a grotesque light on the pretty boy he’s pretending to be. And yet, although I don’t pay much attention to what’s being done to me, I go over and endlessly evaluate what I see being done: I’ve loved or detested my friends, become extremely attached or separated myself from them, not because of how they were with me, but because of what they became with others—and especially certain others, those you can subject without any bother to social and family hierarchies and the prejudices and racism that reigns. It doesn’t make me happy to admit that, in France, when it comes to a test like that, I don’t even need all the fingers of one hand to count those I’m fond of.
I tell Francesco how shocked I am by his behavior with his younger siblings. My rare reproach surprises him; it had never ever occurred to him that a circumstance so insignificant in his eyes would provoke it. But his concern for pleasing takes precedence. He learned to stifle his hardness when I was there. He knew, besides, that he should gain Pablos’s trust,
since I was fond of the little boy. The surprising thing is that gradually he himself began to trust the child; and as a result, he even dared kiss and fondle another homosexual adolescent in a very amorous way in front of a totally amused Pablos, who climbed up to me (I was standing) and did almost the same to me.
The letters. During my first time away, he had a high-school friend compose and write out some letters to me for him, in a style he figured was favorable: one blank page, some empty formulas, not one word worth reading. The process was absurd, given the degree of closeness we enjoyed, and after I myself had helped him to write equally formal letters. But he’d forgotten.
My answer reminded him of it and furnished him with the right model. Then I got some illiterate, obscene, snickering scrawling that exactly matched the particular tone we shared. In Paris I got homesick for this city; it was all I thought about, I was in a rotten mood and couldn’t stand anybody; I was more bad-tempered and tormented than I’d been during puberty. Only Francesco’s letters made me happy, and perhaps more than the presence of their author would have been able to. Likewise, during each of my return trips here, when the plane descended, in the angle of its sun-flooded wing I spotted the city looking vast but tiny, rustic and green, nicely concentrated and round in the midst of an arid countryside, and my feelings brought me to the point of tears, although it was more emotion than a moment later, when I was back in these streets, among these houses, this climate and these men. Because I wasn’t smitten with this city for the purpose of gazing at it, but to live there; so I’d forget it the moment it began to make me exist. It was happiness itself that I was hoping to get from it, which it alone gave me, out of all the places I’ve seen.
The error in tone in Francesco’s first letters wasn’t really the result of his having forgotten something. In reality, he had qualms about spreading the debauchery we took with each other to that new domain. He hated revealing himself in a raw light, preferred to seem chic, rich, educated, formal, and the letters that I was asking for put him face to face with an embarrassing obligation: abandoning the most proven recipes for seduction and pleasing me by displaying exactly what displeased others. Since he had nothing against behaving naturally, provided the payoff was as profitable as that of a well-played con, he adapted. And the enormous amount of scribbling he sent me, its fantasy, abundance, its ornamentation and the drawings accompanying it (it took him an incredibly long time to draw something; the smallest part of an ass, heart or cock meant a full hour of work) showed how happy he was to practice a form of freedom that, for once, wasn’t harmful to him.
The sessions in which I’d help him write letters for his “friends” were harsh. He’d dictate, or explain what was supposed to be said, all the while mocking them ruthlessly; he’d have me string together corny, pompous sentences, with nothing that followed. The finished letter was a caricature of a nice note communicating deep, fawning, bombastic friendship.
“Now I’m going to send this to that faggot bastard,” he’d declare with glee, as he sealed the envelope. Obviously, since he was confiding this in me, I wasn’t part of Francesco’s faggot bastards.
What made him a consummate actor was a quality that was rare among people like him. He was very sensitive to the effect being produced; but for him it was no mere trick, it was also a means of developing a persona. He needed to begin afresh every day; the material results, the gifts, money, promises were secondary. He’d betray himself ceaselessly in order to adapt to others and remain on their favorable side, the most flattering one, like an animal that wants to stay in a sunbeam and follows its path, transforming itself into fish, insect, ox, lizard, bird, human being, according to whether the sun is touching a river, anthill, plow, rock, tree or restaurant terrace. But false notions made him pick the signs he used for guidance, and because his errors didn’t bother me, neither did it ever occur to me to point them out to him. Or so rarely that he only thought I was being capricious.
We almost never went for walks, he was afraid of being seen. No problem, but friendships deteriorate when confined to four walls. The boys who aren’t attracted to men don’t show any such reserve; they go out with me, flaunt it, greet me in public by kissing me, as is the local custom. They’re not afraid of damaging their reputation, or they make a joke of it. A friend of Francesco, a well-off teenager who leads an easy, lazy life and doesn’t sleep with men, waits for his girlfriend of the moment near me at an outdoor cafe (he spends his time cruising girls, getting drunk, buying nice clothes). We chat, get on well together. A few days later, he tells me that the girl saw him with me, and since foreigners always have a reputation for bad morals, she treated him like a queer and broke up with him. He laughs about it, showing all his teeth.
His tolerance for me is connected to his being harebrained; he makes a fuss over children, gives change to the poor, helps the disabled in the street, showers his friends with gifts, does a thousand favors for me; he’s a hundred percent kindness, laughter, humbleness and generosity. You like him for it a lot, but no one imitates him. That definitely proves that people think he kind of has a screw loose. Passing as queer amuses him because he doesn’t see any inconvenience in being that way. It’s an attitude common to all straights satisfied by their own tastes; homophobes invariably have sour balls or bitter vaginas, repressed desire, anxious undies, and when they have sex it’s on a bed of little scissors. Their hatred of homosexuals is only a form of their aversion and fear in the face of all sexuality, a fear of their withdrawal, their failures. I’ve never had a problem coexisting with straights, male or female, as long as they like pleasure. And the war of ways hasn’t taken place between the two predilections, but between humanity and the insects.
This boy was born happy: his father died before being the cause of more children, he had a rich mother who didn’t beat him, a big house in a working-class neighborhood, a future good inheritance of farms and land waiting for him, a pleasant face, an attractive body and the best health. All he lacked was reason.
He laughed at the girl, but he doesn’t look down on anyone. Instead, he figures that everything turns out for the best. When he falls for an idiot and it illuminates his stupidity as never before, this also offers him a way to get over her. When he loves a girl who has a temper and she sees in him a chance for more blow-ups, she’s giving him the opportunity to stop putting up with them any longer. When a virtuous girl refuses his advances, he avoids the erotic censure that would dominate in his bed if she climbed into it. And so on. His mind goes no further because he meets so many girls he wants. If he likes one of them, it’s for the pleasure he gets out of it and not so he can think about it at the office. So he’s not very civilized, and neither are his conquests any more so.
Francesco hates walking. One of his former gentlemen, a German police officer, made him get up at dawn for a long session in the gym and jogging field after they had sex. Running eighteen miles, he claims. I bet every yard felt like twenty to him. The man would pay him to exercise. It’s a more common way of getting pleasure from an adolescent for those who aren’t having intercourse with them, for teachers or parents, rather than for others. But Francesco collected monsters. A one-legged man locked him up for thirty days in his hotel room. A sadist fondled him for weeks, and when it was time to leave, tied him to chair, flogged him to the point of drawing blood and covered him with sperm and cash. Francesco remembers the amount and has forgotten the pain.
In the northern part of the city, there are big vacant lots, high mounds of dry claylike dunes, fields of manure where lean cows graze. These grassless hillocks and this dust, the deserted bends of a road, a giant, tortuously deep ditch full of deep crevices through which flows a miniscule river, all give this landscape a mountain or moonlike aridity that appeals to me. I can only manage to drive Francesco to a small sewer, a somewhat verdant brook frequented by donkeys, and where a few storks and some big white birds are pecking. Francesco says they’re cowbirds, and one of them is perched on the rump of a donkey. I com
e closer to get a better look at my storks with their feet in water; they may be another kind of wading bird. They all fly away. The donkeys stay. They don’t fly, I say. Francesco looks at me with astonishment.
Of course, he’d rather go to new, modern places, where there are buildings, department stores and posh cafes, cars, cold-acting passersby. He looks down on the old city: according to him it’s tacky, dirty, smelly, obscene, everybody does and shows every single thing they do outdoors; he’s humiliated by my dragging him toward where he lives, which he thinks is a pigsty. I didn’t insist and went on by myself. I walked a lot at night; but not in a neighborhood and park they say is invaded by criminals and which it seems even the police won’t risk at night. The thousands of little streets with their high-risk atmosphere inspired a feeling of infinite peace in me.
Francesco doesn’t understand why I do things a bourgeois person wouldn’t do: housework, cooking, the dishes, the wash, for example. But I enjoy taking care of myself, and if someone managed the domestic aspects of my life, I’d be deprived. Now I have my sheets washed, whereas, for a long time, I washed them very carefully in my bathtub: not so much to save money but out of my habit of figuring things out myself. Doing chores isn’t a burden for me, but I adapt badly to the schedule and intrusion of anybody else taking care of it. This lack of flexibility goes to the point of my preferring to fast on certain days rather than go out and buy groceries; for me the street isn’t neutral territory, nor are the shopkeepers or their hours, and I don’t start doing rounds without sufficient reason. So if tearing myself away from my cave seems more of a disruption than staying hungry, I just look for something to nibble on, like sugar or a crust of bread. I’d be a lousy wolf, but I’ve everything that makes a good hermit.