“You know,” she begins, “for a while now I have been studying the Way of the Body as a Japanese scholar might the Way of Wisdom or the Way of Tea: in order to isolate myself. At the end of all perfection, there is solitude and night. Others live in order to be filled: with love, money, alcohol, memories, and so forth. I live to be emptied. When I feel men come in me, when I feel them both proud and ashamed of having filled me with a teaspoonful of sperm, I feel myself grow emptier each time, until I become almost a perfect hollow, a champagne glass, an exquisite piece of porcelain, nearly immaterial. What you call my masochism, because there is no other word for it, ends up engulfing me, relieves me of the condition of being.”
We have drunk a great deal. Her voice, marked by that drowsy drunkenness that precedes sleep, is of a frightening whiteness.
“J. P. whips you—he tells me so,” she continues. “And you also beat me. But they aren’t the same. You look for yourself in the pain, but I like it for what it takes away from me: my skin, desires, dreams. To no longer be only flesh, because flesh is nothing. Pain puts me somewhere else. Everything becomes blurred. Sometimes there is even a moment—maybe you have noticed this—when the pain itself fades away. I become pleasure, pure pleasure—in other words, nothing.”
“What about us?” I ask after a short silence.
“You mean because I say I love you? With you, I give you all of myself, my body, my cries, my tears, because I don’t care about them. I give you everything I don’t want. That’s the paradox, you see: at the end of the Way of the Body, the body is no longer there. Only the egotistical sensation of emptiness remains. It’s not for you that I let your fingers bury themselves in me, not for you that I touch you. I could just as well touch a statue. That would be less involving, that’s all. Less varied. Marble can be learned—slowly, but nonetheless learned. A body is a composite of metamorphoses, and with each gesture, at every instant, you have to be attentive to the modifications of the body of the other, to its undulations, its flights...”
“So, not with me more than J. P.?”
“You a little less than he. J. P. is profoundly egotistical; he lives in a state of self-absorption you’re still far from. He is already nearly completely empty. Maybe he has always been: it’s a gift.”
“Okay. And what will you do when you are finally a master in your Way?”
“I will kill myself,” she says. “Death will be just a completion. The perfection of my annihilation. Nothing new: an organ note.”
She brings the bottle of champagne to the foot of the bed and, her mouth open, empties the last drops onto her tongue. I lean over and manage to steal several of these last tears from her mouth. She lets herself be kissed with compliance, but without passion. Am I really nothing more than one of the many tongues that have come to gather honey from hers?
“There’s no more champagne,” she murmurs.
She throws the bottle against the wall with a violence I never would have suspected. The glass explodes, then falls to the floor.
I look at her. She is completely drunk, lying down, her eyes closed.
Lose her? No. I don’t want to lose her. I don’t want to.
She turns on her other side. The mass of her long curly hair consumes her face. I look at her for a long time, in the void.
I shiver. I take a bedspread and cover her up again. I get up, telephone J. P. “Yes,” he says. I take a shower, dress, and go out.2
Horizontal delirium.
Drunk with blows.
“Keep it,” he says, giving me the whip.
It is a long bullwhip, very fine, made of black lambskin. At the end, a short nylon tip that ends in a knot.
“Go home,” he says. “I have work to do.”
Notes
1‘Their relations were so completely dual that as soon as we three got together, which happened rarely, the silent protocol stipulated that Florence alone had the right to beat Nathalie, and that I would never whip Florence in front of her. However, as soon as I was alone with one or the other of them, I was exclusively the master of the game. I treated them like twin sisters in masochism, without seeing very well what was specific to either one of them.
2I know that in writing these lines Florence re-experiences her former sensations, as when she takes the same streets, or rides the elevator up to my place, knowing that in the moments to come she will be a pure wellspring of cries, and that she will leave with her buttocks on fire. Up to my door and beyond it, she could have always returned untouched, but she rang, entering as if for a doctor’s appointment. She would come by on a whim, silently imploring her ration of pain.
Chapter VI
December
“The two sexes are perpetually at odds,” as the saying goes.
There is such a difference between how men and women make love. A woman is opened, and she opens you. Each time I am under Nathalie’s mouth and fingers, I have the impression of unfolding, as a Chinese paper flower unfolds when thrown in water. I give of myself. Pleasure dilates me.
With a man, it’s not the same. Pleasure contracts me. It gags me, plugs me up, shuts me up, closes me. When a cock plunges in, a door closes.
Not that the sensation is unpleasant, since there is also pleasure there. But the meaning is different. There is no competition with Nathalie: just an understanding, a marvelous understanding. With J. P., I know I am going to end up broken, torn to pieces. I resist as much as I can, but pain and fear end up carrying the day, always. Whereas I leave Nathalie’s arms more broken, perhaps, but more whole each time.
I never really knew the degree to which she could be opened. I am neither petite nor small-boned, and my wrists are, shall we say, a tad lacking in finesse. But that evening, I fuck her like a man, with my hands, and she opens up for me better than she would have for a man. My whole hand is engulfed by her sex; I make a fist inside her, then pull it out. “It’s like a baby’s head,” she says, and she bites my lip very hard as she kisses me. I also bury my hand in her ass (with more ease, besides), go up to the middle of my forearm, my fingers digging into the depths of her belly, feel the terrible contractions of her anus around my arm as I masturbate her at the same time. Fist-fucking, as gay men say...
Apparently, the most painful part is when I pull out my hand after she comes.
She grabs my wrist and lengthily, lovingly, sucks each one of my grimy fingers.1
“Who taught you to open up like that, Nathalie?”
She drags dreamily on her cigarette, leans toward me, and exhales the smoke on my breasts.
“You did,” she says, laughing.
“Stop—”
“It’s true,” she says. “No man has ever penetrated me like you.”
“Have there been many?”
“Men? A fair number, yes.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know for sure. One day, when I was seventeen, I was recruited as a ‘hostess’ for a party organized by the Jaguar-France Club.
“All those obsessed aficionados of beautiful engines, at Bagatelle. There was a pavilion with champagne and petits fours, and behind it thirty or forty models of Jaguars glistened under the moonlight. We were having a marvelous spring.
“The evening dragged on, extended by alcohol. Jaguar was paying, and the company was full of Brits being snobby about the older single malts and the relative merits of the Highlands versus Islay. I may appear pretty knowledgeable to you, but I learned a lot that night. In short, who knows how it happened? You know how I am when I drink! I only remember that at a given moment, I was lying on the cold and immense hood of a black Jaguar E-type. I was completely naked—and several—the majority, no doubt—of the guys who were there had fucked me in one way or another.”
“All of them?”
“I don’t know. A lot of them. One, whether because he couldn’t get it up or because he thought it was a better idea, grabbed a Jaguar statuette—the totem of the e
vening. It was on a table. It was much bigger than the ones you see on the hoods of cars. He fucked me with it—the front paws and the metal head, round and icy, maybe three times the size of a man’s cock, were buried in my cunt. I screamed. He let go, and the statue, which was very heavy, fell out, though it still hung from me by the claws. Somebody else came along and tried to fuck my ass, but the head of the Jaguar took up all the room.”
“Lucky for you it wasn’t the Rolls Royce Club!” I grimaced.
But the image of the statue bumping between her thighs was beginning to hypnotize me.
“Very funny,” she said. “Afterwards, some of them caught all the sperm dribbling out of my cunt with a tablespoon and gave it to me to drink. Then I had another glass of Scotch.”
I took a deep breath.
“And how was it?”
“Salty,” she said, laughing. “Don’t you find it salty?”
I evaded the question. “Nathalie?”
“Yes?”
“What do you like best, when you make love?”
“What do I like best? What all my lovers like, with me. You know me by heart, right?”
“Truer words were never spoken.”
“Then tell me: what do my lovers see, above everything else, in me? What are the alpha and the omega of my body?”
I didn’t need to answer her. A thousand times I had told her that I loved her buttocks, which were like a marvelous drop of water suspended miraculously under a stem.
“From the beginning,” she continued, since I hadn’t said anything. “From the beginning. I was young, there was a prof I adored—well, finally, I think, it comes down to the same thing, but in the end, I resolved to seduce him. And it really wasn’t too difficult! Anyway, one Wednesday afternoon, when school was out, I found myself at his place, my heart beating. He kissed me, took my clothes off, caressed me a lot, fucked me up the ass a lot. And nothing else happened. For the whole of our affair (two years, maybe), he never took me otherwise.
“Oh! I almost forgot: he also spanked me, from the beginning. The first time he penetrated my ass, it hurt just a little bit—just long enough for me to ask what I had gotten myself into. Then he touched me, tamed me—and spanked me, hard. He penetrated me again, and fucked me for a long time, all the while caressing me. I came, and I had that marvelous feeling you have when it’s somebody else who makes you come; plus, it’s a bonus when you come with a cock planted in you, to the depths, and not as your mother said you should.”
Her eyes took on a singular cast whenever she mentioned her mother.
“Afterwards, it became like a game, a rite. He would spank me—with his hand, or belt, sometimes—then he would fuck me up the ass, and I would come. It became automatic: I was trained to come like that. My ass would be bare, and I would be lying on my stomach, or across his knees, already wet. And when I felt the tip of his cock push against my ‘rosebud,’ as the poets say, I would already be on the brink of orgasm. He would fuck me while he jerked me off, I would come, and only afterwards would he ejaculate. The majority of the time, I was already so hot, so beside myself, that I did not feel the sperm flow into me. I only knew he had come because he was buried all the way inside me but not moving, and because my anus was palpitating around a cock that was slowly getting soft.”
(I had never known anyone who used with so much, nearly naïve ease the words most inflammatory to the imagination.)
“So who took your virginity?”
“A girl. Strange, no? A year and a half later, during the summer. She was the first woman who ever seduced me. She did it with her fingers. God, how I bled!”
“And since then?”
“Since then, I don’t know how many there have been. More men than women, in any case. It’s easier. However...I like men, but I love only women. Anyway, you know what I mean.”
“No,” I say, kissing her.
When we kissed, she was always the girl, and her lips enfolded mine with a moist warmth that made me feel faint.
Notes
1Here was inserted a long scatological scene in which the narrator pulled out from her lover’s ass enough shit to smear herself all over with, then rubbed against her until they formed a single odiferous body. I thought it wise to suggest to Florence to cut these excesses lest she try her reader’s patience. In fact, I wanted to keep these particularly delicious moments to myself.
Chapter VII
December: Continuation
There was a short period when Nathalie and I nearly tried to live together.
We would sleep together—her breathing was so slight that twenty times over I thought she was dead. We used to share sumptuous breakfasts—she had converted me to tea and a very lightly sugared orange marmalade we found in an English shop. We would leave together for the university, meet again between classes. Once in the elevator, we met by accident—I had run to catch it just when the doors were about to close, and there she was, jammed between five or six students. She winked, smiling, and between the mezzanine and the fourth floor, taking advantage of the multiple stops, entrances, and exits, she slipped next to me, her back against my belly, and with a mischievous hand gliding outside of my skirt, caressed my thighs and sex without anyone noticing. In maybe one minute, she brought me to the brink of orgasm. Then we separated, each of us going to her own classroom, and the sensation of my empty cunt and wet underpants kept me from hearing what was said that hour, so full was I with the need, barely checked, to finish with a rapid stroke of my index finger what she had so nicely begun.
During this period, another girl was flirting with her—a frustrated-virgin type. She was irritating, brushing up against her, her insinuations as subtle as a whore’s makeup. One day Nathalie took me by the hand and introduced us:
“Do you know Florence?” she asked. Then immediately afterward, she added: “She’s the one I love.”
Good God, I almost believed her.
One Saturday, a beautiful and cold day, she told me she needed to get out of the city, that Paris was weighing upon her. She had a paper to write on seventeenth-century theater. She would go to Versailles, take a closer look at the magnificent theater the king had built to his scale. She was especially enthusiastic to see the performance hall designed by Gabriel. “The theater in the theater,” she said, with the delighted air of having been the first one to come up with this banality.
We stopped to talk at the rear of the Grand Trianon, leaning our elbows against the balustrade that overlooks the French gardens and, farther off, the great canal.
In the semicircle that connects the gardens to the esplanade, a group of about fifteen Japanese tourists were listening attentively to the commentary of their charming guide. She was one of those Japanese women—I’d known one or two of them at school—who adroitly mixes a traditional way of life with excursions into French culture, and who lives, and rather comfortably at that, off of little jobs like this one, connecting her hurried compatriots on the Grand Tour to the fleeting countryside.
Nathalie was holding my hand, so we must have been the spitting image of the lovers of Pont Mirabeau. I was having a good day so feeling a bit ridiculous, instead of killing my love for her, only strengthened it.
I released her hand, letting mine fall between us, then distractedly touched her thigh. I glided my hand down the front of her coat’s low neckline, then rolled the fabric of her skirt between my fingers.
Still on our elbows above the balustrade, just above the Japanese group, we appeared not to have budged an iota. My hand moved along the length of her stockings—I had forbidden her to wear pantyhose from the very first day—and slipped under that pretext for panties called a Brazilian thong.
She started when my icy fingers came into contact with her thighs and buttocks.
There was a short pause, during which I warmed myself with the heat of her body.
The vision of my hand plucking the little bit of fabric (which I had chosen myself that morning) excited me, and I abandoned myself ent
irely to it.
As usual, she was wet.
My hand slid along the furrow of her gorgeous thighs, then across her supple labia. My wrist softly rubbed against her sex, then dove deep to her clitoris, as if nothing particularly important were happening. She spread her legs slightly.
There was nearly no one else on the terrace of the chateau; in any case, the vague folds of her coat hid my handiwork.
Below us, the Japanese guide cheeped on, her compatriots nodding their heads like mechanical dolls, marking less their acceptance than the fact that they were following the commentary.
One of them, evidently audacious enough to stop listening to the guide’s no-doubt illuminating remarks, began to stare at the beautiful blond just above him, leaning on her elbows with her girlfriend. He quickly focused his camera and photographed us.
At the very moment when he depressed the button, I shifted my hand backwards and thrust my index and middle fingers into Nathalie’s vagina. Surprised, she widened her eyes and parted her lips, just for an instant.
This was precisely what the click of the shutter captured on that cold day in mid-December. As if slightly disconcerted, the Japanese man lowered the camera for an instant; perhaps he wanted to verify with the naked eye what his lens had revealed to him. Again he raised his camera and aimed.
Nathalie stared at him, hiding nothing of her ascent into pleasure, though I knew her capable of coming intensely without batting an eyelash. As my fingers groped about inside her, I buried my thumb in her asshole and rubbed it against the slender partition of flesh separating it from my index finger. She presented the Japanese man with a singular recital of flaring nostrils and open mouth. One spasm, then another. Her chin moved with each ecstatic sigh; her tongue passed slowly over her lips, dry with desire. At each pause, the Japanese man took a photograph. Merely by watching Nathalie’s oh-so-changeable face, one could guess the moment at which the click would resound.1
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