I wonder if my grandmother could have committed suicide. I don’t know. I like to believe that she did it, as it would have been the sole act of freedom in her entire existence. A woman who spent her whole life making children (seven in twenty years), raising them, and then being relegated to remain in the shadow of a celebrated and capricious husband.
* * *
So Thomas Andrieu lives in this village synonymous in my family with death.
He lives on a farm. His parents are farmers who own a little plot of land. They are modest people who sell the product of their vineyard to cognac distilleries. He corrects himself: Actually the vineyard is just a row of vines surrounded by low walls.
I would like to interrupt to tell him that I understand what he is talking about. In front of my elementary school, on the other side of the main road, there were vines growing on the sloping hillsides. Great tortured gnarled branches that looked like some fabulous beast. At seven or eight years old, I asked to participate in the harvest. As the principal’s son, I was told that it wasn’t my place but I begged, so they gave in as one does to a child’s whim. I was sent to the neighbors who produced the cognac. Look at the well-dressed child “picking the grapes”—lifting up the leaves, untying the clusters, and placing them in a bucket too carefully. As always, this child isn’t aware that he’s being favored, that his presence is only tolerated, since it is actually real and hard work. Work that requires concentration, agility, and endurance. The Spaniards next to me have been brought in for two or three weeks to collect the grapes, a cheap and docile workforce coming from Bilbao or Sevilla. I like the happy Spaniards with their weather-beaten skin. I understand nothing they say. In the evenings they meet up at a campsite of caravans they have parked in the fields. No doubt they are being exploited but they don’t complain. With the fruits of their labor, a famous brandy is manufactured. A very expensive liqueur exported around the entire world, consumed in China and Japan, generating profits they will never see.
As the day ends, I am the amusing child in the tub with his bare feet and legs, stamping on the grapes to crush the skins. It’s the end of the season, and everyone gathers around a long table. People are speaking loudly, drinking, laughing, playing the guitar, for the last time before the Spaniards leave to return the following autumn, or possibly never. For me the separation is heartbreaking. Later I sit in the distillery in front of the stills and copper pipes, waiting for the smoke to escape. It’s called “the angel’s share.” I am the child who is waiting for the share of the angels. My father was amused to have his son participate in this ritual, but he had already repeated many times over that he didn’t want this life for me. No land or field work, no manual labor. It was out of the question for him that I should be a member of the working class.
So I stay silent when Thomas talks about the vineyard.
He says that he raises cows too, that they have quite a few. This time I speak up to tell him that I know how to milk cows. There was a stable in the village I grew up in. Every other night, we would go to buy fresh milk (warm, since it had just come out of the animal). I was fascinated by the sight of the farmer kneading the udder to extract the milk. I immediately asked her to show me how to do it. She taught me the gestures, and I was good at it. It was like a game for me, and I’m good at games. And I wasn’t afraid of the cows, not afraid when they tapped me with their hooves and swished their tails. They had to understand that I wasn’t afraid so that they would let themselves go. When I tell the story now of how I happened to possess this skill, no one believes me, convinced that I’m just inventing one of my stories. A drawback of my habit of embellishing.
The moment I tell Thomas, he cracks up laughing. He can’t imagine me sitting on a little stool, my fingers kneading the teats of a cow. It makes me angry. He says that I’m not that boy there, that it’s impossible. He says I’m a boy of books, from somewhere else.
* * *
This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.
* * *
The rain continues to pound against the roof of the shed. We are alone in the world. I’ve never enjoyed the rain so much.
* * *
He says that he loves the farm, the land. But he aspires to something else. I reply that he will do something else since he has embarked on the studies that will allow him to, that once he has his bac in his pocket, he can try medicine, or the pharmacy, or whatever he wants. He responds that he isn’t sure it’s possible because he’s the only boy in the family. He has two sisters and the farm will die if he doesn’t take it over. The idea offends me. I tell him we’re not still living in the fifties. That sons don’t necessarily have to take over from their fathers, that farming is no longer hereditary and agriculture is doomed to die anyway, it’s a dead end. I tell him he has to think about his future. His expression darkens. He says he doesn’t like when I talk like that.
The rain lets up a little. He gets up to go look outside across the fields, at the muddy, almost gray, lawn, the uncertain boundaries, the rusty poles and loose nets tossed about by the gusts of wind, the deserted bleachers; all this desolation. He puts on his jeans. He’s still shirtless, in spite of the cold. I get up too. I start to press myself against his back, wrapping my arms around his pelvis. He tenses at the contact, repelling my tenderness. I say: It’s so you’ll be less cold.
He gently disengages from my embrace, grabs his T-shirt and sweater, and puts them back on.
Obviously he’s still bothered by what I said about leaving the farm, “killing the father.” He seems to think that I know nothing about it. He also thinks that I don’t realize the violence of such an act. He’s offended by what he views as carelessness on my part.
He says that for me things are simple, that everything will be fine, that I will get out of it, it’s already written, that there’s nothing to worry about, the world will greet me with open arms. Whereas for him there’s a barrier, an impenetrable wall, forbidding him to deviate from what has been predetermined.
Whenever he mentions this question of the forbidden I will try in vain to show him that he’s wrong.
* * *
The rain stops and suddenly we feel less protected, less cut off from others. It seems to us that someone could show up. I notice the agitation of his features, his leg twitching. He must get out of this place, leave right now. It’s become an imperative. Before he opens the door I dare to ask: Will we see each other again soon?
He doesn’t hesitate.
He says: Yes, obviously.
I hear the “obviously,” which signals that a story has begun, that we will not return to the way it was before, that everything will not stop. I could cry but I know it’s too sentimental.
I say: If you want, the next time we can meet at my place.
He’s unable to mask his surprise, or his reluctance. I form several theories—he prefers unlikely, complicated places, a room is too expected, predictable, bourgeois; he prefers neutral territory, a place where we are equal, to play at the home field of your opponent puts you at a disadvantage; he’s not sure if he wants to become acquainted with this intimate place, it will turn a corner in the course of our involvement.
I figure that the only real acceptable objection to his reluctance must be material, concrete, almost trivial. I say: My parents work, they’re almost never there, we won’t be bothered. I’m counting on his fear of being found out. He says okay, that he will come.
A day and time are set.
He tells me to leave the shed first. He’ll wait a few minutes, to lock the door. He stands back a little at a distance as if to avoid any possible outpouring of emotion, any tenderness. For the duration of our relationship, Thomas will be wary of anything tender.
* * *
And come to think of it, he won’t ever invite me to his place, not even once. I will never see the grazing animals, the farmhous
e or the vineyards surrounding it. I will never see its interior, the cool tiles, the plaster walls, the dark rooms with low ceilings, the heavy, solid furniture. (I’ve invented all this, you know, precisely because I never saw it.) I won’t ever meet his parents, not even from afar. There will be no handshake, no pleasantries exchanged between us; I presume that he would never have spoken to them about me, even inadvertently (he’s not the inadvertent type). I would have liked to have seen which one he most resembled. Obviously, I wouldn’t have betrayed him. I would’ve played the role of the nice schoolmate. I’m capable of playing any part.
One day I decided to go to his village, Lagarde, on my own. It was a day when I knew he wouldn’t be there so I roamed around trying to figure out which house and family were his. I was tempted to ask an old man sitting on a bench in front of the church, but then I changed my mind, feeling suddenly embarrassed by my recklessness, and left.
* * *
On the day itself, moments before Thomas rings the bell to my house, I have an anxiety attack. I shaved twice, even though I have almost no beard to speak of, and cut myself, leaving a gash along the bottom of my left cheek. I put the styptic pencil on it, but it didn’t help. I’m convinced that I’m now horribly disfigured. I put cologne on too, which I normally don’t do, and it makes me reek. It’s my father’s cologne, a heady earthy scent dominated by musk. I put on dark clothes—black jeans, a navy sweater—that I think Thomas will like, and then at the last minute change back into my original outfit of blue jeans and a green shirt. I counted the hours and minutes before he showed up, watched from behind the curtains by the window so he wouldn’t see me. I really regretted not knowing how to smoke. I thought a cigarette would serve me well at that moment, since people say it helps calm the nerves.
He doesn’t notice my excitement when he comes in, or any of the efforts I’ve made either. It’s only the house that interests him; he walks around it as though it’s a minefield. He mentions nothing of the size or the light or the décor, he says simply that there are a lot of books, that he has never seen so many books. Not wanting to linger he asks to see my room. We have to go up two flights of stairs.
* * *
The room is quite big, cut in half by a partition that separates the bedroom from the desk area. It’s in the attic so the windows are small. There is old cream-colored carpeting on the floor scattered with stains left by muddy boots. Posters of the pop singer Jean-Jacques Goldman are taped up on the wall. Thomas lowers his eyebrows and gives me a look, intending to poke fun at me. He claims that Goldman is music for girls. Annoyed, I tell him he’s wrong, that he has to listen closely to the lyrics. He says the lyrics aren’t important, only the music counts and the energy that you get from it. He listens to the rock band Téléphone. I don’t argue with him about Téléphone’s lyrics because he would think I was trying to teach him a lesson. For him in that instant I am hopelessly girly.
If I had known it then, I could have told him that Marguerite Duras was crazy for the Hervé Vilard ballad “Capri, It’s Over.” In Yann Andrea Steiner, she wrote:
Yes. One day it will happen, one day you’ll miss horribly what you described as “unbearable”—what we tried to do, you and I, in the summer of 1980, that summer of wind and rain.
Sometimes it happens by the sea. When the beach grows empty, at nightfall. After the children’s summer camps have gone. All over the sands a shriek goes up, saying that Capri is over. It was the city of our early love, but now it’s over. Over.
It’s suddenly awful. Awful. Whenever it happens it makes you want to weep, run away, die, because Capri has revolved with the earth, revolved toward the forgetting of love.
I also could have spoken to him about what the director François Truffaut had to say through the character Mathilde, played by Fanny Ardant, in The Woman Next Door, since I had just seen the film.
I only listen to songs because they tell the truth. The more stupid they are, the more honest. And incidentally, they are not stupid. What do they say? They say: “Don’t leave me . . . Your absence has broken my life . . . ,” or “I’m an empty house without you . . . Let me become a shadow of your shadow . . . ,” or “Without love, you are nothing at all . . .”
To which the character Bernard, played by Gérard Depardieu, responds:
Okay, Mathilde, I have to go now.
When he comments on my musical tastes, I sense in Thomas the same weary disdain, the same desire to move on to something else. He goes back to the books—this crazy number of books in the house neatly lined up or stacked in piles. All of a sudden I see a sort of admiration return to his face, but it’s a painful admiration; what he likes about me is also what keeps me separate from him.
* * *
He says that he wants to suck me off, that it can’t wait. One would swear that this need just came to him, out of nowhere, that seconds before it didn’t exist, that it hasn’t been building up for days. He throws me on the bed, unfastens my jeans, and lowers my briefs. If he could, he would have torn them, it’s like a scene from a straight porno film, the girl who gets her white cotton panties ripped off. I let myself grow in his mouth. At first I don’t dare look at him, telling myself he wouldn’t want to be watched while doing such a thing. I’m still thinking that everything has to be done according to him and his desires, his inhibitions too. Finally, slowly, I raise my head and lean back on my elbows and take in the sight of him. I’m struck by his voracity. He’s like a ravenous child who has just been given food and prefers to choke on it. I’m not sure where this need for another man’s sex comes from but I sense that on the other side of all the repression and self-censoring there exists an equally powerful fervor.
* * *
During the next several weeks, I begin to wonder if he chose me only because I was available, because I was the ideal vehicle through which to fulfill his repressed desires, because he hadn’t yet found others like me. I will repeat to myself: I am for him a boy he fucks, nothing more. I’m reduced to a body, a penis, a function.
* * *
Before I forget: Regarding uncomplicated sex, many years later I will spend time with porn actors. I’ll even live with one for many months in California, the mecca of the porn industry. I will go regularly to film shoots and watch the actors warm up, fake attraction, grab each other, get a rhythm going, freeze for photographs, and then resume with the panting as if nothing happened. I’ll become close to these guys who have sex for a few hundred dollars. I’ll discover that certain ones do it just to make a living, and for them it’s a job like any other—they’re just managing with what nature has given them. Others are like machines. They spend hours each day at the gym for the sole purpose of having the perfect body, or, more precisely, a body that corresponds to the standards of the business. They shoot themselves up with steroids, their shoulders riddled with scars they go to the tanning salon; it’s a constant competition on set. And then, finally, there are the ones who derive pleasure from having multiple partners and frolicking in front of the camera. Sometimes they even fall under the spell of their partner of the day, bringing more truth to the performance perhaps. They are all crazy about their bodies. They all claim that for them, sex is a vital need, like a drug. Their vulnerability touches me.
* * *
Thomas undresses, leaving his clothes around the room. He wants to be naked himself so that our skin touches (he has no problem with nudity and teaches me to be less afraid of mine). He caresses me with hands that know exactly what to do. He bites my hips, my torso. He groans, no longer able to contain it, a sound that he releases maybe without even realizing it himself; he moves me tremendously. As I’ve said, nothing in life moves me more than these moments of pure abandon, of self-oblivion.
He lies on his stomach, arching slightly for me. I see the hair that runs down the edge of his backside. I slide my tongue there and he groans again, trembling. I see the gooseflesh on the surface of his skin. In front of my eyes is one of the Goldman posters, all around me are t
he artifacts of a teenage boy’s room. A boyhood I’m in the process of annihilating.
* * *
After, he starts talking again. It’s like a gate has opened. It seems that Thomas doesn’t speak a lot. The meals in his family are passed in silence. The evenings are short, since they are often exhausted and have to go to bed early. At school, I’ve noticed that he always holds back a little, dragging on a cigarette and letting others do the talking. Sometimes he doesn’t even bother to act as though he were listening. I remember loving this about him, his air of isolation. Now he feels he should speak to me, but perhaps it is only for himself, like throwing a bottle into the sea, or keeping a diary or whispering into the ground like King Midas’s barber because it’s just too much to keep to himself.
* * *
He tells me about his little sisters, Nathalie and Sandrine. Sixteen and eleven years old respectively.
Nathalie is a year and a half younger than he is. It made sense for a second child to be born so soon after the first one, but he says she doesn’t look anything like him. She takes after their father. She has his light eyes, his strength.
I say: So you, do you take after your mother then? He says yes, he has her dark complexion. He adds: Something of the foreigner. I don’t understand the phrase. I don’t ask for an explanation, believing that explanations will come later.
Nathalie quit her general studies to go to a secretarial school where she also boards. She returns on Friday nights and helps with the farmwork on the weekends. There is always something to do.
He says that they don’t get along very well, that they don’t have good chemistry; he finds her too practical, too planted in real life, always lecturing everyone as though she were already old.
Lie With Me Page 4