It would probably be better not to try to fathom which one predominates here—wisdom, superstitious fear, or a certain sybaritism disguised as indifference; if I keep to my role as a person determined above all not to deceive himself about what he is, then too rigorous a concern to measure each of these components of my behavior would risk conveying me into a speculative area where—as a matter of self-respect as much as intellectual scruple—the desire to conclude (and to find, if possible, an elegant solution) would take precedence over all other considerations, so that my thrust toward a greater exactitude would in the end work to the detriment of the truth. But, nevertheless, I feel discomfort and some regret at leaving this question hanging; it is irksome not to be thorough in an examination of conscience and I also don’t tolerate very well the sense that I have left an unresolved problem behind me, once I decide to pose that problem myself: in domains that changed over time—childish brainteasers being gradually replaced by subtler puzzles—I have for a long time taken a keen pleasure in deciphering enigmas, and perhaps it is merely my laziness (implying a disgust for any effort not justified by the hope of a result of some importance) that has little by little deflected me from benevolently playing Oedipus as I did during the period when my brother and I were so passionate about small problems to be elucidated that we not only set about establishing predictions based on facts collected from the racing newspapers but together wrote, for our own use, a Journal des Concours entirely devoted to games imitating those that so many dailies, and so many periodicals for adults as well as magazines for children, offered their readers, in some corner where a “diversion” took the place of news, information, or literature of any kind whatsoever.
My brother and I, who have by now attained, even passed beyond, the stage of maturity and have more or less forgotten that there exists any difference in age between us, are separated by a gap of four years. When we amused ourselves with exercising our perspicacity—for love of the art—on useless objects and, in a parallel way, stubbornly sought the key to the great mysteries that present themselves to the curiosity of every child, this handicap of four years placed me on a level far below his; quite a long time before me, he had found out, for instance, that Father Christmas was only a fiction, but he was prudent enough not to let anyone know about his discovery, judging it wise to conceal from everyone (even from me, who played the role, with him, of confidant or coadjutor) the fact that he no longer believed in a fiction by virtue of which he received toys every twenty-fifth of December; by some means I don’t know about, he had also penetrated a little family secret and discovered, without saying anything about this either, that the person we had been taught to call “sister”—so that it would be clearly understood that she had the same rights as we did to our parents’ affection—was in reality only a first cousin being brought up with us; and lastly, he was enlightened earlier than I about part of the enigma of sex and had reached that first stage of knowledge which consists in being aware that a newborn child was formed in its mother’s womb and that it is because of this that we have a navel.
The delight in entering, through successive unveilings, the reality of things. Conceived on the same principle as those books of plates in which, for teaching purposes, the external and internal anatomy of the human body is revealed, the thin advertising leaflets that we brought back from the first Salon de l’Automobile—the one in which was exhibited, still covered with dirt from its long trip, the car that had done the Paris-Peking rally—showed us, stripped bare in each of the series of colored and captioned diagrams, the structure of the vehicles manufactured by the De Dion-Bouton and Panhard-Levassor companies: body, chassis, engine and details of engine parts as well as of the transmission system, a collection of plans and overlays in superimposed layers, arranged in such a way that, flipping through the leaflet and going from the simple exterior view to a succession of views in section that were more and more limited and elaborate, you went farther forward at every page into the heart of the machine.
To study these leaflets and give yourself the illusion that you possessed a knowledge of mechanics almost equal to that of an engineer was only a game which you didn’t give another thought to once the leaflets were closed again. With each page turned, there was certainly the joy of making a discovery and the pride of acquiring a few scraps of knowledge about how the car seats were upholstered, about the delicate assembling of the cogged parts that formed the differential, and about the functioning of the basic pieces of equipment, the magneto and the carburetor; but this was still a superficial pleasure; here were not the real problems, those whose progressive solution was indistinguishable from the motion of life itself, so that the boy who had advanced far enough in them gained the right to be described as a “man of the world.”
At the time when I saw Tales of Hoffmann, with its three tales related to the romantic theme of the unhappy lover who drinks in order to forget and of the consoling Muse enveloped, as by incense, in the fumes of his drunkenness, three tales whose single, enigmatic pivot is much less the singer Stella than love seen as having a threefold aspect (as passionate fixation on what is only a pure image such as Olympia the dummy, as alienation of self in carnal delirium as with Giulietta the thief of reflection, as erosion of one’s being by an exhausting exaltation of the feelings, as for Antonia who dies from her own song), I am not sure what stage I had reached in that initiation whose end may be considered as having been attained when, after much time and many different adventures, one begins to perceive that it has no end and will only be completed when one has experienced, not death, but decline and then decrepitude, which follow so closely upon one’s period of ascendancy. I don’t know if the schoolmate who appointed himself my mentor during a good part of these early years had yet taught me how one could transform into an instrument of consuming bliss the organ hitherto exclusively employed in the satisfaction of what in the language of children is called the petits besoins [lit., little needs; call of nature] and if this companion (the very same who, one day when we were out walking, had defended me against our teasing fellow pupils when they claimed, in a vexatious general outcry, that I had “fait pipi dans ma culotte” [peed in my pants], whereas I had only splashed myself while washing my hands at a fountain or quenching my thirst)—I don’t know if this friend, more experienced and more diligent than I, had already taken it upon himself to explain to me the mechanism of the act of love, in the guise of the following apologue: a little boy and a little girl show each other their organs and when the little girl asks him, “What’s that?” the little boy says to her, “It’s a finger. And what’s that?” to which the little girl answers, “It’s an eye,” and the little boy concludes, “Hey, let’s play put the finger in the eye!” Can I even be sure that at the time when the transvestism of Nicklausse attracted me so I really knew girls were different from boys other than that girls wore skirts and their hair was longer? If I did know, it was only in a very theoretical way (from having seen my little niece when she was being washed and dressed in her baby clothes or, when I was taken to museums, from not having failed to notice that the female figures did not have that appendage which, among the men, was generally hidden under a grape leaf). At this uncertain stage, I was not yet very far removed from the time when one of my most cherished desires—the first of this kind, perhaps, that I recall having experienced—was to read the “texte intégral” [unabridged text] of the Contes de Perrault (reference to which I had seen in some bookstore advertisement) because I had imagined that in this unexpurgated version I would have a chance to learn something about how women became mothers.
Except for the great revelations about the body—the revelation of solitary pleasure and then of the complete act of love—it is by scarcely perceptible stages that one progresses in this kind of knowledge. What one knows doesn’t count for much compared to what one sees, and still less compared to what one senses. To have seen this, to know how to do that—this is certainly what matters, and more than in any othe
r domain, here pure science takes a backseat to applied science.
As we were still trying to find our way—our eyes covered as for a game of blindman’s buff—along the tortuous paths of theory, the discussions I had with my brother every day were fueled for a while by the story of exploits attributed to a character of his invention: a little girl named, I think, Marcelle, who was very sharp and whose usual jokes consisted either of pissing in front of the boys or of showing them her split pantaloons (or her behind, for quite often she walked around with her sex and buttocks naked under her skirt). The stories about Marcelle—whom we discussed as though she were a real person whom we knew—were a sort of password between us. At that time, neither my brother nor I had ever held within the field of our vision the sex of a pubescent girl or one approaching puberty any more than that of a young lady or a woman; we viewed the imagined pranks of Marcelle with a mixture of amusement, admiration, and sympathy, but I wouldn’t venture to say that we would have liked to have a kid of this sort within the circle of our friends (though with her a working knowledge of a number of things would have been so easy!) because the fact is that we were both quite shy children, preoccupied with love but having very innocent loves ourselves: little girls seen from a distance or barely approached, such as the adolescent we fought over in a spa in the Vosges, or those two sisters we said we were in love with during an earlier visit to a Flemish beach, my brother taking the older one and I the younger, whom we had dubbed “Faust” because of a little toque she wore, and of whom I recall only how, with her sister, she burst out laughing when she saw me come in last, by far, in a children’s race organized on the occasion of some festival or other.
For my own part (and without my being able to remember whether my brother was with me when the thing took place), I recall with a certain distinctness the circumstances under which I saw, for the first time, a girl’s sex worthy of being designated by a coarser word than the word vulva or any other more or less scientific term applicable to the organ by virtue of which a woman is what she is—the sex of a girl developed enough already for the question of decency or indecency to be brought up in connection with her and for the display of that part of her body which it would be unseemly to name, whatever name was used, to constitute a spectacle of a nature to disturb, if not the man I have become, at least the little boy I was then. This girl’s sex—the first I saw that was charged with enough erotic potential for the word cunt to be able to be applied to it—appeared to me in the sun of a summer day, on a beach of fine sand swarming with people at bathing time. I can’t say precisely whether this happened at Ramsgate, a very crowded beach in the county of Kent, or at Biarritz at the beginning of the 1914—18 war, when we ended up there as semirefugees, my favorite brother and I having left with our sister and her little girl at the beginning of the Germans’ advance on Paris, then my mother coming to join us along with our older brother once the latter returned from England, where he had been staying for several months in order to practice his English. Chronologically, the vacation at Ramsgate (where I see myself in a Norfolk outfit with short trousers) is located approximately in the month of August 1913 and therefore predates by scarcely more than a year the withdrawal of our household (except for my father) toward the Spanish border, to the wealthy town where they bought me my first suit with long trousers; the possible error is not great, therefore (despite the step up where clothes are concerned), if it is the damp sand of Ramsgate rather than that of Biarritz which I choose retrospectively as pedestal for this vision; the reason for the choice is that something exotic, non-French—and more likely Anglo-Saxon than Iberian—remains attached to the vague image I have retained of the girl in question. She was a tall, thin little girl whose breasts had not yet budded and whose body was still hairless; standing in the water, which reached halfway up her legs at most, she had just been swimming or diving in the sea and the bathing suit she was wearing—white or some very light color—had become transparent; it seems to me that over her shoulders, a little hunched from apprehension about the onrush of the next foaming billow, fell her wet hair—skimpy hair, rather long, perhaps gathered into braids, but certainly not opulent. For the first time, therefore, I was seeing, practically nude, a girl who had to be about the same age as I (twelve or thirteen, depending on whether the setting of the story was Ramsgate or Biarritz) and who, though not yet nubile, had nevertheless reached a stage in her bodily development such that she could no longer show herself unblushingly in a state of nature. What probably surprised me the most, when I had the godsend of this spectacle, was that I wasn’t at all excited. I gazed with curiosity at this sex, reduced to a simple cleft in an unattractive flesh about which nothing indicated womanliness except for that almost abstract split which presented itself to my eyes much less as an object of desire than as a strange thing, a thing whose outcropping into broad daylight seemed so unexpected and so obscene that—if it hadn’t been for my contentment at having seen— what it would have aroused in me would have been disgust more than anything else. It is probable that if, in any circumstances whatsoever, my gaze could have rested on the nudity of a fully developed woman and if this woman had been in the least desirable, I would have felt the effect of her attractiveness and been engulfed in ecstasy and confusion; but I was at the time much too young, and too naive, to be in any condition to perceive the woman in the little girl and she herself, though already fairly tall, too visibly still under the age of puberty for the appearance of her sex through the wet web of the cloth to be more than merely incongruous. Clearly, anything that belongs to the domain of the erotic always has two sides to it: attraction soon changes to repulsion, fear is close to desire, and it is difficult to distinguish, among the mysteries of the body, those that rank as marvels from those that are merely ignominious (before I learned that the same gesture repeated a certain number of times in the proper rhythm could lead to the miracle of climax, it was with an admiration not unmixed with horror and disgust that I had seen my brother cause the skin of his penis to slip down in such a way as to uncover the glans, his virgin’s unwashed glans, in order to show me that he was ahead of me and now capable of “uncapping”).
Beyond this darkness, sometimes diaphanous, sometimes muddy, which we prospected eagerly, impatient to extract its essential wealth from it and little given to being squeamish about what we managed by chance to bring to light, there was puberty, that is, the moment when we could regard ourselves as virtually men and when (it seemed to us) our eyes would be totally opened, like those of Adam and Eve after manducation of the apple. For the time being, there was only, for us—anxious for virility and for that premonitory sign, the mue, which would deepen our voices after straining them oddly—that innocuous thing they called “growth,” which served our mother as the explanation for so many of the little complaints that might chance to afflict us: a little stiffness or headache, poor digestion, a slight rise in temperature—venial ills for which growth was generally blamed.
Our heights measured with our backs to the wall and marked with a pencil line, exercises with barbells in the evening under our father’s direction, precautions against the “heat and cold,” cod-liver oil, Manceau syrup, phytin [a white, nearly tasteless powder used as a general stimulant]—all this, clear as day and posing no problems, was associated with growth like the garden that had been rented in the rue Jasmin so that we would get some fresh air and like the gymnasium in the rue Pierre-Guérin. Personal observations of and experiments on our own bodies, the race toward puberty, competitions as to who would be the most completely a “man of the world”—all this, too, concerned our physical beings and their development, but seen from a more abstruse perspective, limited to what we only talked about to each other, what did not even appear in the notebooks or on the isolated sheets of paper that we covered with our handwriting or that we used for drawing. Contrary to official knowledge, traditional knowledge admits of transmission only from mouth to ear and we were, all in all, fully esoteric, expecting from pube
rty, as from a philosopher’s stone, our transmutation.
If every initiation is sanctioned by trials, I must acknowledge that the sessions in the gymnasium at 5 rue Pierre-Guérin as well as the ingestions of cod-liver oil provided them for me in ample measure. I faced them in the most mediocre way, and it might be even better to say that I didn’t face them at all. Would my instructors have had more success if it had occurred to them to represent these unpleasant events as formalities that no one could avoid if he wanted to become a man in the sense in which I understood it? I would hesitate to suggest this, so great was my disgust for cod-liver oil (which they made me take, I recall, from an egg cup with a closed bottom, of white china threaded with pink or blue, which disgusted me even more than drinking it from a spoon) and so strong was my horror for certain of the exercises one had to perform under the direction of the physical-education teachers.
The class, in the rue Pierre-Guérin, usually began with quite simple movements—as in Swedish gymnastics—movements I consented to with fairly good grace because they could be carried out without pain and, being executed firmly on one’s feet without the use of any apparatus, did not give occasion for vertigo. This was the neutral part of the class, the part I would happily have seen prolonged but which, as I knew all too well from experience, would be brief. Next came exercises with barbells or Indian clubs which also had nothing fearful about them and were even rather amusing because it was pleasant to feel one’s arms weighted and sometimes pulled along this way by what they were carrying as though beyond their own impetus. The work on the parallel bars, already more athletic but still almost at ground level, represented a way of putting oneself in motion that was without any viciousness and was so situated, in the organization of the classes, that much more terrible drills were generally excluded on the days when we did this one.
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