I say: I’ll follow you.
At that moment, I would have followed him anywhere, done anything he asked.
* * *
I’m still not totally convinced it exists, thinking such speed and ease are only for films and bad novels, or in big cities where they’re used to cruising and fucking—uncomplicated one-night stands. A couple of years earlier I had watched two strangers meet and leave together. After one look, they disappeared behind a gateway at the edge of the Bordeaux–Saint-Jean train station right near a sex shop. I was fifteen years old and it shocked and troubled me, but mostly I was incredulous. I kept telling myself: You must be mistaken. It’s your imagination. Nobody locks themselves into anything like that at first glance.
I’m still there. Still in this innocence. Can you imagine?
* * *
He gets up, leaves five francs on the table for the beer he barely touched. I follow him outside. We walk in silence; he’s always just a little bit ahead of me. He walks quickly with his shoulders hunched, and it isn’t only because of the cold. He lights another cigarette. I envision the knotted muscles of his body, the milky skin dotted with moles. I have to quicken my pace to make up for lagging behind.
To my great surprise, we return to school, but at the last moment, we cut across the gym, which is closed and empty at this hour. At least that’s what I suppose. But he has everything planned. He bypasses the wood basketball court, scales a wall, and reaches a small window and pushes it open. He climbs into it. I wonder how he knows about this opening, if perhaps this unlikely route was well planned and already practiced. He gives me a hand so I can climb through the window when it’s my turn. I think that’s the first contact, his outstretched hand. I never touched him before and then it happens during a break-in.
The place we land is deserted, smelling of teenagers’ leftover sweat, pungent and unclean. The floor creaks under our feet. The far corner leads to the locker room. Thomas continues in this direction, up to the cloakroom, past the showers.
Love is made there.
* * *
Love, it’s mouths that seek, lips that bite, drawing a little blood. His stubble irritates my chin, his hands grab my jaw so that I can’t escape.
It’s the coarseness of his hair where I slide my fingers, the tautness of his neck. My arms close around him, encircle him to be as close as possible, so that there is no space between us.
It’s torsos that join together and then withdraw in a hurry to remove clothing, the Nordic sweater, the T-shirt, so that finally it’s skin next to skin. His torso is muscular and hairless, with nipples that are flat and dark. My chest is skinny, not yet deformed as it will be four years later by the blows of an emergency room doctor.
It’s skin that is frantically caressed. My fingers find a constellation of moles, just as I guessed, on his back.
It’s jeans that we unbutton. I discover his sex, veiny, white, sumptuous. I am enthralled by his sex. It will take many years and many lovers before I ever return to this sense of amazement.
Love, it’s taking each other in the mouth, maintaining a certain comportment despite the frenzy. It’s exercising restraint not to come, the excitement is so powerful. It’s abandonment, that crazy trust in the other.
I guessed that it was not the first time for him. His movements are too sure, too simple not to have been practiced before with someone else, maybe with many others.
And then, he asks me to take him. He says the words, without shame, without ordering me to either. I obey him, though I’m afraid. I know that it can hurt if the other person doesn’t know how to do it, that the body can resist.
We make love without a condom.
AIDS is there though. We even know its true identity. It’s no longer referred to as the “gay cancer.” It’s there but we think we are safe from it. We know nothing of the grand decimation that will follow, depriving us of our best friends and old lovers, that will bring us together in cemeteries and cause us to scratch out names in our address books, enraging us with so many absences, such profound loss. It is there but we aren’t afraid yet. We believe that we are protected by our youth. We are seventeen years old. You don’t die when you are seventeen years old.
Suffering transforms into pleasure.
And then after, fatigue. A gigantic fatigue that leaves us dazed, mute, and dumbfounded. It takes us several minutes to come back to life. We get dressed without looking at each other.
I would like to make a gesture, something resembling tenderness, but I stop myself.
We leave the gym as we came in, sneaking ourselves through the window, and return to the biting cold of winter outside.
He says: Bye.
And then he disappears.
* * *
I should be able to stay in this state of ecstasy. Or astonishment. Or let myself be overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of it all. But the feeling that prevails the moment he disappears is that of being abandoned. Perhaps because it is already a familiar feeling.
* * *
It was a carnival, one that happened every year during Easter on the Place du Château. There were rides, a carousel with wooden horses, bumper cars; a rifle-shooting game with pink and blue stuffed toys to win; a slide; slot machines; a punching ball to measure your strength; candy stands; the scent of cotton candy and waffles; alcoholic drinks for the grown-ups; a carnie, hidden from sight, who didn’t stop barking into a microphone; and the music too loud, all the time. There were no clowns or magicians, no doubt they were too expensive for a town like Barbezieux.
I was seven years old. I pleaded so much that my mother finally gave in and took me. There was very little in the way of amusements near us except for this one carnival once a year.
I was dazzled. I wanted to climb on the carousel over and over, I tried to catch Mickey’s tail, I begged to go on every single ride. I was an exhausting child. I didn’t notice my mother was worn out. I also didn’t notice when she recognized one of our neighbors and stopped to talk with her. I was far too occupied with gnawing on the candied apple she’d bought for me and that I devoured while watching the bumper cars, fascinated by the collisions, and the shouting and electric sparks from above the track. I was so entranced that I let myself get carried away by this crazy messy joyful crowd who paid no attention to a tiny young boy. The crowd pulled me away from my mother. When I finally noticed, it was too late, she was no longer in my sight. Suddenly I realized how exhausted she was. She had just told me, “You tire me out.” And in that fraction of a second I decided that she’d abandoned me there because she couldn’t take me and my hyperactivity anymore. I became convinced that she’d run off and was never coming back. It was the end. I would be alone forever. I began crying, then screaming, a child’s keening lament. I dropped the remains of my candied apple on the ground and went running in the direction I’d seen her last, but she wasn’t there. I started running in every direction, colliding into the legs of strangers. Most likely I ran only a few yards but the memory I have is one of an interminable, anarchic, exhausting race. Finally, my mother found me. She grabbed my arm and began to lecture me. She too had been terrified, panicking when she realized that she couldn’t find me. She’d searched everywhere, yelling my name, but I hadn’t heard her because of the barker with the microphone, the loud music, the laughing crowds. She screamed over the noise that I was absolutely impossible! I couldn’t just go away, couldn’t just let go of her hand. She yanked even harder, hurting my arm. I could see nothing but her anger, an anger that rendered me speechless. A moment ago I had imagined myself an orphan and when I found my mother again it was only to bear her recriminations.
When Thomas disappears around the corner of the gym, I am seven years old again.
* * *
The following days are a nightmare.
I doubt that my lover will come to me, since he’s the one who insisted on this wall of silence. The other students would surely not fail to notice if he by chance greeted me, if he happened to s
ay hello, even casually. Because, as I said, we ran in very different circles, a crossing, even an accidental, furtive one, was inconceivable. It was clear to me that it was out of the question to take even the slightest risk.
I understand and yet I can’t help but hope for a sign, one only detectable by us, his brushing up against me inadvertently, a glance that no one else can spot, a brief smile. I dream of a brief smile.
But there is nothing. Nothing at all.
Most of the time, he arrives at school at the last moment and leaves as soon as the bell rings. He hardly exits his classroom.
And as for the rare seconds scraped together on the playground, or in the hallway, when we’re finally in the same place: total indifference. Worse than coldness. An attentive observer might even discern a certain hostility, a determination to keep his distance.
This coldness mortifies me. It confirms all my worst fears.
I ask myself: Does he regret it? Was it only a stroke of madness for him? A tragic, wrongheaded, even grotesque error? He acts as if nothing happened, or as if everything should be forgotten, buried. It’s even worse than being forgotten, it’s a denial. And then suddenly, I can’t see anything but his rejection. It’s as if he’s negating everything that transpired between us, one body against the other, as if the image has been completely erased.
To escape this feeling of being excommunicated, I reason with myself: perhaps he was simply disappointed, I didn’t live up to what he had imagined. I keep telling myself that despite the evidence, it can be fixed, I can make it up to him. I’m already hoping to be able to beg for another chance. I hang on to the possibility of redemption.
But of course, I come back to my nearsightedness, my lack of muscle tone, the ugly blue Nordic sweater, my off-putting air of superiority; so many defects, so many defeats. I go back to what I was before, the boy who intrigues, not the boy who satisfies. I tell myself that pleasing him was just an illusion, and that pleasure itself lasts only as long as an embrace in a closet.
* * *
I discover the pain of waiting, because there is this refusal to admit defeat, to believe that a future where it happens again is possible. I try to convince myself that he’ll make some kind of sign in my direction. The memory of our tangled bodies will overcome his resistance, it has to. As he told me himself, it’s a question of necessity. You can’t fight necessity. If you do, necessity will win.
I discover the pain of missing someone. I miss his skin, his body, which I once possessed and then had taken away from me. It must be given back under threat of madness.
* * *
Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy. It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. I wonder sometimes if I have ever written of anything else. It’s as if I never recovered from it: the inaccessible other, occupying all my thoughts.
The death of so many of my friends in my youth will aggravate this tendency. Their premature disappearance will further plunge me into depths of sorrow and uncertainty. I will have to learn how to survive them, and perhaps writing is a good means of survival. A way of not forgetting the ones who have disappeared, of continuing a dialogue.
The source of this missing and longing can be found in this first desertion, this imbecilic burning love.
* * *
I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang on to and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, unidentifiable sound can make you jump.
In order not to sink completely, I hang on to the memory of his body: his white veiny penis, his moles. This vivid memory saves me from ruin.
It will be nine days before Thomas approaches me again.
Nine days. That number has stayed with me.
We cross paths in a hallway darkened by the winter rain, the kind of rain that invites the night into the day. I am leaving the library again. I checked out a book, I don’t remember the title, maybe Swann’s Way by Proust, which I had tried to read before without success. In any case it is definitely not a contemporary novel, because those are rare.(The National Education board must have thought that they had to lock us in the past, to protect us from the present. They made us learn all the classics and kept us in this state like little scholarly monkeys.) So, as I’m leaving the library, holding the book I’ve checked out firmly against my side, Thomas walks in my direction, enchanting and petrifying me. I see him put his hand in his back pocket and take something out. It’s a piece of paper. He hands it to me quickly, as if hoping not to get caught, and then continues on his way. I guess he waited for a good moment to be alone with me to make his move. I am taken aback by this excess precaution; in another context I would have found it ridiculous. But I understand the fear and panic he carries with him. I know how strong this fear is and also that it can’t only be the fear of being caught. It’s a fear of himself too. A fear of what he is.
* * *
I wait for the hallways to empty out, making myself late for the class I’m returning to, and I unfold the piece of paper. There is just a place and a time written on it. Nothing else, not my name, no signature. There is no warmth, no good wishes, just the essential information. The piece of paper can never be used as evidence against him. We have a new date.
* * *
This time he’s chosen a shed next to the soccer field where the sports equipment and uniforms are stored. The field is unoccupied; it’s raining so hard that playing any sport right now would be impractical. I run under the downpour, mud clinging to the hem of my pants. When I reach the shed, I notice that the door is ajar. Thomas waits for me inside. His clothes are soaked too; drops of water fall from his hair and roll onto his cheeks. He has just arrived. I ask how he is, how he managed to open the door without the key since these buildings are usually closed to prevent theft. I find out that there is no lock that can resist him. He has been picking locks since he was little, amusing his father and his cousins with his dexterity. They asked him regularly to perform this sleight of hand at the end of Sunday lunches. He’s a bit of a magician.
I realize then that we are having our first conversation.
Up until then, he was the only one to speak. At the café, with the drunks and gamblers, I didn’t say a word. Afterward, in the gym, there was only sex. Now here we are talking about how to pick locks, how he discovered he possessed this talent and perfected it. I smile when he tells me the story. It’s also the first time I’ve smiled at him. He smiles back at me. It seems as intimate to me, as magnetic, as skin against skin.
His hair continues to drip water, the wet strands sticking to his forehead. His beauty is devastating. He kneels down on the mattress. I do the same.
* * *
I don’t say: Why did you wait so long before showing up? Did you hesitate? Did you decide not to see me anymore before changing your mind? I know that I must never ask him these kinds of questions, I can’t ever ask him to explain himself, and knowing this crushes me.
I don’t say: I missed you. Showing any sentimentality or gushing on my part would horrify him.
I speak of locks. And I have no metaphors. Simply because there are none.
And then silence comes. Our looks shift, shyness and desire masking them. The kisses come. Carnivorous kisses.
* * *
As soon as the desire is satisfied, pleasure achieved, our bodies sated, I figure it will be like the last time in the gym: the silence, the faces turned away, the hurried separation. But he has decided otherwise. He says that it would be better to wait since it’s still raining too hard and there won’t be anyone outside anyway. I under
stand that he intends to speak.
* * *
He says that he lives in Lagarde-sur-le-Né. I know the village; my grandmother died there. I say “village” but there is no real village. It’s essentially farmland. There is one country road that leads into town. It was precisely on this road that my grandmother was crushed. It was at the end of the day, at twilight—the hour we call “between a dog and a wolf.” She was crossing the street after my grandfather. I may have once known what they were doing there, but I’ve forgotten. They were most likely meeting up with friends who lived in the area. They parked their car at the side of the road and then had to cross it. He went first, as he always did. She didn’t hear the van coming. Though she wasn’t hit hard, it was hard enough for her to succumb to her injuries. My grandfather didn’t see the collision; his back was turned. He heard the braking and the impact and when he turned back around, her body was on the ground. Her head had hit the pavement. It was this trauma that proved to be fatal. My grandmother was not even sixty years old. I was very young when she died. I don’t really have memories of her, I simply recall a blurry image of a gray-haired woman standing behind a bay window, but this is probably a conjured image, it might not even exist. I know the story because it has been recounted to me numerous times, because everyone lamented the negligence. This bad luck, to die on a deserted road that almost no one ever used. It was the fault of the dim light, they said. One minute earlier or later, it never would have happened. I remember this expression, “One minute earlier or later.”
Years later, the film director Patrice Chéreau told me (knowing nothing of this drama): People who die from being crushed sometimes do it on purpose. They throw themselves under the wheels of cars. It’s particularly true when the accident seems to be incomprehensible, when everyone is convinced that it could have been avoided. He even had a character in his last film, Persecution, say something along the same lines: “It suits everyone to believe in an accident. It’s less embarrassing than a suicide.”
Lie With Me Page 3