Abel and Cain is of a different tradition. It’s one of those vast masterpieces for the chosen few, like Journey to the End of the Night and Gravity’s Rainbow. Von Rezzori is a Céline with a conscience. He’s a Pynchon who has outgrown the movies.
—JOSHUA COHEN
THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Translation revised by Marshall Yarbrough
For whom else but you!
I RAN AFTER him. I caught up with him on the stairs. He turned to me and saw my face as I asked him, “You’re coming back for sure? You promise?” He kissed me very tenderly on the forehead and on the eyes and on the mouth and took my hands and kissed one and then the other, saying, “I swear to you, my darling, of course I’m coming back.” “Why don’t you take me along right now?” I asked. “I can come with you right now.” “Like that—naked as a jaybird?” he asked and kissed my breast. (I only had a towel wrapped around me.) I said, “I’ll run and get dressed.” I wanted him to come back to the room with me. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said. He was very sweet with me. He took my face in both his hands and pulled it close to his—and then tapped his finger on my nose. “Hurry up!” I ran back to the room to get dressed.
When he first tried to pick me up, I wanted to turn my back on him. A guy like him means trouble. Well into his forties and suspiciously elegant, with no real money behind him. But I’d had a bad day: two johns in the morning and then no one else until five. It was foggy all day. I noticed right off he’d been drinking, and he said, “You’re very beautiful, my pet. We’re going to have a good time. But would you mind waiting for one minute? I want to get an Alka-Seltzer at the drugstore. I’ve had quite a bit to drink and I haven’t eaten all day.” I thought to myself, Whatever you get at the drugstore, you can go fuck your mother with it, and your little sister too. But then I only walked a couple of steps away from him, up to the streetlamp and no farther, and I was too lazy to signal to Ginette, who probably was only half a block away in the fog. (She’d been standing out there all day long too.) Five minutes later, he was back, Alka-Seltzer in hand. (Whatever you really got at the drugstore, you can shove it up your mother’s ass, I thought.) “Shall we go?” he said. “Or do you have other plans?”
Any other day, I wouldn’t have taken him on. But the fog was getting on my nerves, I was tired of standing around, my feet hurt. I wanted to lie down for fifteen minutes, even with a guy on my stomach. Besides, something in his face made me feel I could deal with him easily if he tried any funny business: there was something soft and dreamy about him. Like Ginette’s brother, who paints and bums around and is always wanting to kill himself. (All the same, you can really have a good laugh with him.) So I only said, “Do you even have a hundred francs on you?” And he said, “I thought children and soldiers paid half price. Why do I have to pay double?” I said, “Then take your tube of Alka-Seltzer and shove it up your mother. It’s probably just the right size for her.” But he laughed and said, “I think you’re mistaken. My mother was very beautiful and knew some better sizes. Besides, that’s how she made her living—like you.” I thought to myself, You can talk all you want. Everyone makes up stories for us, and so do we, especially when someone asks What’s a nice girl like you doing in this racket anyway. I’ve got six different versions in stock, all of them very believable. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter much if a guy is bullshitting you or not when he tells you stuff, whether he wants you to believe he’s a baker or a Rothschild. In fact, it doesn’t matter at all. So long as he screws like a baker (fast and honest) and pays like a Rothschild, then everything’s okay. But usually it’s the other way around: they fuck you for hours and then they won’t even treat you to a tisane over and above the fifty francs.
But anyway what he did was press two hundred francs into my hand—and now I was on the alert. ’Cause if a guy starts out like that, there’s a catch somewhere. Then they’ve got some special kink—they want to spank you, or want you to spank them. But he wasn’t English; he had a very slight Russian accent. Probably some Jew from Hungary or Romania—we’ll see, I thought. Anyway, he took my arm like a fiancé, and I tried to shake him off, and he didn’t say, “Ohlala! Are you ever touchy!” but instead held on and said, “Don’t be afraid. I don’t want anything from you that will humiliate you or make you feel ashamed. The first hundred is for the bed and the other one for friendliness, that’s all.”
I’ve heard that line too: “That’s all.” But no john ever thought of saying, “I don’t want anything from you that will humiliate you or make you feel ashamed.” I had to think about how that fitted in with him. Anyway, I let him take my arm, and we walked to the hotel like a married couple going home from a movie, warm and close together and in step.
When he paid Gaston for the room (without hiding the fact he had money in his pocket but without showing off about it either), he said, “And please leave us undisturbed for a good hour.” I tried to give Gaston a look meaning I wasn’t planning to waste the whole evening. But the bastard glanced away and said, “Certainly, sir. You’ve paid for twenty-four hours.” So I thought Gaston knew him, and the guy was a cop. But then I realized it was only his tone of voice (and the tip too, of course). That prick Gaston simply caught on that this was one of those johns who feel at home in hotels (and much better ones than this). They instantly had that goddamn secret understanding between them, like all these asshole bourgeois types: bicyclists by nature, if you get what I mean; they bow upward and tread downward, and they’ll all get strung up when the Red Internationale finally wins.
Anyway, I couldn’t count on Gaston, and when we were up in the room, the usual stuff began. He wanted me to take everything off, including my panties (“Your feet will warm up faster without stockings,” and all that shit), and when we were both finally lying in bed stark naked, he took me in his arms and lay back and said, “Let’s smoke a cigarette.”
I wanted to explain that he’d better not think he could play a joke on me for two hundred francs, and he ought to tell me what the hell he wanted or leave me be and go home. But when he lay there with his head on the pillow, staring up at the ceiling, I thought to myself, He’s just impotent, or he’s got problems getting it up—after all, he’s not young anymore. I’m gonna have a lot of trouble with him; I’ll probably have to take him in my mouth. Anyway, let’s smoke a cigarette first, for Christ’s sake. Maybe he’ll doze off, and I can take off without him noticing.
So we watched the smoke going up to the ceiling and we didn’t say a word, again like a married couple after a movie. Skin to skin under the blanket and head to head on the pillow. Except once, he asked, “Don’t you recognize me? I was at the Madeleine once with a friend who had a quick number with you. Pretty much in broad daylight. A German. He couldn’t speak a word of French. Of course, that was a while back, more than three years ago.” And I just shook my head—who cares about his friends.
He went quiet again and kept on smoking. And once, he turned his face to me and kissed me on the temple. Strangely enough, he seemed like a kid when he did that, all dreamy. Then he carefully put out his cigarette in the ashtray and mine too and he uncovered my breasts and stroked and kissed them and said, “You’re beautiful.” And I thought to myself, If it’s gonna be difficult, then let’s get started at least. So I grabbed his dick to get it into shape, but he was stiff and ready to go. He started caressing me too, and so he wouldn’t get me really excited I pretended I was; I put on a good act, like I couldn’t wait for him to get inside me. But he held me close and he only kissed me—not on the mouth, of course (I don’t want chancres on my lips), but everywhere else on my face, in a gentle rain of small tender kisses. Finally, I got so impatient I couldn’t think of anything better to say than “You forgot to take your Alka-Seltzer.” But of course he only laughed and said, “I don’t even know where it is. In some pocket or other. No, wait: I think I left it downstairs on the clerk’s desk.” And when I quickly said, “I’ll ge
t it for you,” he kissed me on the forehead again and said, “That’s all right, my love. I don’t need it now. I’m not drunk anymore.”
It was like we actually had been married for ten years, and I decided to really bullshit, and I said emphatically, “Come to me now, but first you have to put on a rubber.” But even that didn’t faze him, even though usually johns give me the most long-winded arguments. He was as patient as a Franciscan and he smiled down at me (he was resting his head on his arm and looking into my face so kindly, it was like he was my aunt), and finally he just said, “Don’t be difficult, dear. I’m not sick. If you like, you can examine me.”
So that’s the way it was. Fine then.
I looked him over and milked him and squeezed him so hard that I figured blood would come out. In any case, he was no Jew. And finally, he pulled me back on the pillow and said, “That’s enough now, isn’t it?” And he was already inside me; I don’t even know how, but as skillful as a monkey and real deep right away. And he stayed like that for a while and just slowly moved around in me.
It wasn’t the way it sometimes happens with a woman—a guy comes along and gets inside you, and suddenly you come, even though there’s nothing special about him and you’re not especially fond of him—it’s simply that you’re compatible in some way you can’t explain. That wasn’t it. I just started liking it. His tenderness, too. He wasn’t excited the way men usually are. He could have gone outside on the street with the same expression on his face. Except that he looked happy. He closed his eyes whenever he gave me one of his soft, tender kisses.
I thought to myself, So that’s what he’s trying to pull, the bastard: he wants to drive you wild. When I acted like I couldn’t wait anymore and wanted him to give it to me now, and began wiggling my ass and breathing heavily and rolling my eyes, he held me tight and said, “Shhh!” The way you shush a child. So finally I asked him, “Why don’t you come? Is it hard for you?” And he said in the quietest voice in the world, “I like to have a little fun doing this. Don’t you?”
Finally I told him he couldn’t expect that from me. First I said, “I only come with my husband. You can understand. It’s the one thing that only he gets from me.” And I was about to think up a guy I lived with, who protected me and who I came with (even though that never happened with my Jules and was anyway very rare—once with Ginette, and with a man yes, but only once, a long, long time ago). But he must have smelled a rat. He said (still smiling and in his quiet voice), “Don’t tell me fairy tales. You’re just lazy, that’s all. I understand that you can’t come with every man if you don’t want to ruin yourself. But I’ll give you another hundred francs, so you can take the rest of the night off.”
If a woman doesn’t want to come, then a guy can screw his cock to shreds, and with a guy in his forties it takes a while anyhow—and who wants to put up with that? If I hadn’t been so tired and bored with standing around in the fog, I would have thought up something to get rid of him. Instead, I said to myself, Let him go on, he’ll get horny enough to come before it gets tedious. So I shut my eyes and let him move around inside me. But soon it got weird: it was just too pleasant. He was incredibly skillful and lay on me without crushing me, and he was clean and he had no flab and his skin was smooth and he was well built. I thought to myself, Christine, my girl, if you get soft now, you might really come, and then you’ll stay with him for a couple of hours and sleep till the day after tomorrow, and you may even fall in love with him, for Christ’s sake, and then you’ll be up to your ass in trouble. Pull yourself together, kid, and try to get rid of the guy as fast as possible and go out into the fog and earn an honest living. And at that same instant, he said to me (still in the same voice, as though we were sitting on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes), “Listen, my dear. You’re very sweet. Let me make a suggestion. For a couple of days you try to get used to me and to living with me. I earn enough to spoil you a little. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll go our own separate ways as the best of friends, and I’ll see to it that you won’t have lost too much income. And if it works, we’ll stay together for as long as it still works. I’m anything but rich, but I write for the movies, and there’s always a nice payday waiting. With a woman with a good head on her shoulders to look after the money, one can live quite comfortably.”
It wasn’t my first offer of this kind, and what pissed me off most was the way he used the stuff about the movies as bait. You can fool some dime-store clerk that’s still wetting her pants, but not a working girl like me. And besides, I thought, who does this bastard think you are anyway? Does he think maybe that because you’ve got a dick inside you, you can’t think clearly? Why doesn’t he just take a violin and fiddle a tango in your ear! And because I was mad, I did something dumb, and I thought to myself, If you tell me stories, buddy, then I’ll tell you a couple too, and I said, “You’re sweet, baby, and that’s why I won’t be nasty and lie to you. You see, I can’t live with a man. I can’t come with men—I don’t know if I’m a lesbian, but in any case, I can’t stand having a man around for more than half an hour.”
Even as I was saying it, I realized how stupid it was to tell him that. Because it is true, sort of. The few times I’ve come in the last couple of years were with Ginette when a john took both of us on (which of course doesn’t mean I’m really a lesbian). Anyway, you’re always a sucker when you tell the truth. I was only hoping that if he thought about me and Ginette, he’d finally get going and I could get him off me. He instantly said, “If that’s the only problem, darling, then we can take as many girls to bed as you can manage.” And I didn’t even have time to think, Of course, you pig! when he already had his hand on me, and I could barely say, “Take your hand away!” when he started to thrust into me very hard—and maybe I accidentally thought of Ginette and the way she comes when some guy fucks her and I play around with her—anyway, I didn’t push his hand away—and all at once, I felt I was going to come, and I screamed, “What the hell are you doing to me!” and I felt him coming at the same time, and I came too and I didn’t know what was going on, only that now he had his mouth on mine and was kissing me wildly, and that now I didn’t even care that a stranger was kissing me on the mouth, because it was good and just like making love.
The worst part was that I dozed off right away. (I’m like a man that way.) But I can’t have been sleeping for long, maybe fifteen minutes. And when I awoke, it was like when you’re swimming in the ocean and a wave comes and lifts you up—and he was there and he caught me in his arms.
But that was only a dream. Actually I woke up because he was caressing me. He had uncovered me all the way and was kneeling over me and caressing my body, my shoulders, my arms, my breasts, my hips—and as though something exquisite remained in his hands, a fragrance or shimmer, some rare happiness in the feeling of warm fullness, he kept kissing his palms, the way an Arab or Hindu prays. It was very sweet, and I pretended I was still asleep so I could enjoy it, dope that I was. He wrapped me in his goddamn tenderness—I got so mad I nearly started to cry. “You lousy bastard,” I said, “you pig, you sonofabitch!” I hit him, and he laughed, and so we scuffled around, almost tumbling out of bed, and then he was inside me again with his monkey skill, and this time he didn’t need any help from his fingers, and I didn’t think about Ginette, or anything else, I just came like in some dirty book, where they always come like it was as natural as pissing.
Afterward I was cheerful, like when I sometimes take the evening off and have a bit to drink, and me and Ginette’s brother go to the booths behind the place Blanche and I try my luck in the shooting galleries. Christ, was I hungry! And for half an hour we tried to figure out what we wanted to eat and where, and he said he didn’t know any of the bistros I knew and he had to get to know them. But then he said, “We’re so close to Prunier, why don’t we go there?” And I said to him, “I don’t want to make trouble for you. They all know me here in the neighborhood and they won’t let us in.” And he said, “But, darling, they’l
l have to get used to seeing you in my bad company.” And so we fooled around until we finally telephoned down to Gaston to send something up. I said, “Now we’ll see how you’re going to spoil me. I want champagne and caviar and oysters and lobster and a filet mignon. You’re lucky the shops are closed now, else I’d have taken you shopping.” And he said, “A couple of diamonds at Cartier, and Yves Saint Laurent’s spring collection, is that it? I’m going to give you a good spanking and stick you in the kitchen and make you cook for both of us and spend no more than ten francs a day. You can go to the movies once a week and that’s all.”
And here a kiss and there a pinch and there a thump, so that we nearly started screwing all over again. But luckily, room service came up with the food, and boy was that ever a bullshit deal! I let the waiter know as much too. “Lemme see the bill!” I said. “They’re ripping you off, these pigs,” I said, and that was a stupid thing, which would cost me dearly. If I hadn’t felt like I did, almost like I was drunk, I would have understood on the spot by the way the waiter looked at me.
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