She stared at me. She leaned toward me and began to minister to my breasts, nibbling them with her teeth, teasing them with her tongue. My nipples responded before I could do anything about it.
“You’re hard,” she said.
She slid a hand between my thighs and caressed me with an assertive rudeness, as an inexperienced boy might. It excited me more than I wanted it to.
“You’re hard,” she repeated.
She took me in her arms and we found ourselves on the floor, her hands all over me, her mouth buried in my sex. I began to pant, then got control again. I remembered some advice J. P. had given me when I had asked him how he could keep from coming for so long. It had stayed with me forever.
“It’s simple,” he had said. “You must be able to control your breathing, as if you were diving at the bottom of an angry sea, and recite to yourself a text that has nothing at all to do with the situation. Something from Corneille, for example. How many times have I found myself mumbling lines from the battle of El Cid against the Moors while buried deep in an asshole or a mouth—”
That had nothing to do with the current situation. The first thing that came to me was Tartuffe—“Oh, close my heart, seat of human weakness,” as Orgon says to Marianne—and I was the one playing Marianne. But there was still too much sensuality in Tartuffe. Corneille, perhaps? Well, nothing’s more unerotic, if I may say so, than to say to oneself, “Rome, the sole object of my feeling,” while an expert mouth explores each fold of your vulva, a tongue wriggles up your clitoral flower, and innumerable fingers dig inside of you...
It’s true, then. The sublime kills eroticism in a single blow.
She finished by lifting her head, surprised, disappointed.
“I see,” she said.
She got up.
“You want to play the whore? Then I’m going to treat you like a whore.”5
Without warning she slapped me, hard.
“I’m warning you, you’ve got to show results.”
She went to the dressing table where I kept my trinkets and baubles and dug through them rapidly, returning with a long silk scarf.
“Lie down on the bed. No, on your back.”
She took my wrists, bound them together, then tied them to the headboard—just as I had myself so often attached her.
She opened my legs and put her pussy against my mouth.
“Lick me,” she said.
Her voice was sharp, so cold it was almost unrecognizable. All the while I caressed her, she did not stop talking.
“Do better than that; put in your tongue; no, deeper; go back to the clit now. No, not so hard. Don’t pull on the ring as if you were going to tear it out. I don’t want you to hurt me today. You, however, are going to get hurt, Flo. I know, you hate it when people call you Flo. Lick my cunt—better than that! Wait, I’ll pull apart my asscheeks. Stick in your tongue—deeper than that. Harder with your tongue...way down to the bottom—”
She was extremely wet, like always, but although I strained to hear her falter, or speak with a different inflection, it was in vain—she spoke with icy mastery, her orders clearly articulated with the most precise words she could dispose of.
“You’re lousy, you poor girl. Hasn’t anyone ever told you you’re lousy? It would take a stretch of imagination for me to come right now. Poor little faggot, you’ve got no dick! You get yourself fucked, then pout about having to suck it afterwards, under the pretext it smells of shit! What were you saying earlier when I was eating you? Whore! You pitiful whore! Lick me better than that! I paid you, didn’t I?”
She freed herself and, standing near the bed, leaned over me.
“You’re not worth it,” she said.
In a corner of the room, she found the long black whip; she came back holding it in her palm.
“J. P. has already hit you with this, right?”
She cracked it with all her strength across my thighs.
I screamed—what else could I do?
I screamed with each blow, which didn’t seem to move her at all.
At a certain moment—very quickly, in fact—I understood she would go farther than anyone ever had—that she was going to exceed my limits, go beyond the pain principle, the point at which pain can still become pleasure, the burning warmth, the whip a caress. I understood I would be hurt—and nothing but hurt. I would be at once the thorns and the forehead, the wrists and the nails, the lance and the side, passion and death. There was no doubt of it.
Worked over. Open, covered with long lacerations in all directions, from my belly to my knees. The blows followed so closely I didn’t have time to catch my breath, and my successive cries drowned out each other.
She hit me with all her strength, and the skin swelled and burst open a little bit everywhere, especially on my nipples where the whip struck sideways, and at my hips and shoulder blades. She came back up towards my breasts, and I thought I was going to faint—it would have been so nice, so comfortable to faint. But no, the pain merely changed tone, biting into the soft flesh of my breasts.
She seemed enraged, for the moment. Bacchanalia. Lost in that drunkenness of inflicting pain I had known myself, when I tortured her.
I thought afterwards it was her love for me she was punishing, or herself, perhaps, in the person of the object of her love. Or was it jealousy—the idea that until now only J. P. had had the right to chastise me? Or did she want to teach me something, something I had been refusing to learn these long months?
As for me—I was a little piece of panting flesh. An uninterrupted cry, as in Paul Eluard’s uninterrupted poetry.
I am the pen and the paper, I am the ink and the blood. Scratched, torn.
The words ran together.
In place of the precise pain of the beginning, which leapt from me with each blow, was substituted an undifferentiated, throbbing suffering. I felt as if I were a blind pupa caught in a terrifying cocoon.
She stopped long enough for me to turn over.
Because I had jumped a lot and twisted away to escape the bite of the whip, which continued to strike me with mechanical regularity, she paused long enough to attach my ankles to the bed with two other scarves. My legs were slightly spread apart.
For an instant, I thought we were going to stop there. She slid her hand between my thighs and grabbed me, crablike, opening my legs without gentleness, forcing my cunt open with her thumb, scratching me on the way in, tearing me, exposing the interior of my inundated cunt.
I’d never experienced anything like it before. When J. P. would whip me, he would dole out the strength and frequency of his blows, stopping just when excitation would disappear beneath the pain—probably because in the end he beat me as much for him as for me. But Nathalie had beaten me with a rage that resembled altruism, had horsewhipped me with a savagery that immediately surpassed erotic subtexts. I was only an immense pain, and my sex ran like skin recovering from a terrible burn.
She let go of me.
I heard her rummaging in the bureau; then she returned.
I still had the strength to scream when she jammed the dildo between my buttocks, dry, pushing it in with all her weight.
I reflexively resisted the intrusion by tightening and contracting my buttocks. That only made things worse. When she forced me more, she tore my anus—at least that’s what it felt like—I was going to remain wounded for life, definitively open.
In a sort of spasm my loins lifted, and she profited from the way my back involuntarily arched to push the synthetic dick all the way in to the flange. Then she tied the whip tresses together, tightly, to close me up.
I sobbed convulsively.
“Poor little baby,” she murmured, caressing my cheek. “Poor little girl whose little fanny hurts—”
I screamed again, though more weakly, when the whip began to strike me again, just as pitilessly, from the backs of my knees to the middle of my back.
Then there was a strange sort of floating, in which I passed into a state beyond pain.6
Several times, between blows, I murmured, “I love you,” as if the bite of the whip had forced the words from me, but it was as if I did not know who I was talking to, as if I were reaching beyond Nathalie, to have myself heard by the quick and the dead.
The whistle of the hard lash beating down, my skin being opened, my back getting flayed, and these sobs escaping from me: “I love you, I love you, I love you—”
All of this made it abundantly clear that my words were not addressed to Nathalie nor to anyone in my present life. They were addressed to a phantom, the first one whom I had—so badly—loved, whom I had betrayed when I left with my mother, the first one who had loved me, body and soul—to whom I was always a little girl or boy. My tears changed in nature and destination. There was something terribly soft in my despair, something that deconstructed me at the same time as it made me emerge from my ruins.
Did Nathalie understand where she had taken me? She stopped beating me and threw the whip to the other side of the room.
I turned my head towards her. She was picking up the bills scattered about the floor. She must have felt me watching her, for she smiled without enthusiasm.
“This money is not mine,” she said. “And you’re not worth this much, anyway.”
She stuffed the wad back in her purse, put on her coat, dug into her pocket.
She came close to the bed. In her hand she had a one-hundred-franc bill.
“Here,” she said. “For the pain.”
She leaned over me and thrust the bill between my buttocks, jamming it beneath the tip of the dildo still planted deep inside me.
“I love you very much, you know.”
She seemed to be thinking of something else.
She left without untying me.
Time passed.
I slowly returned to myself. My whole body was on fire. I was terribly thirsty.
I tugged without success on the scarves binding me. There is nothing less compassionate than silk.
I thought she would come back, untie me, kiss me.
No. Not that day. We had done too much together.
J. P. untied me the following morning.
I had brooded and cried for hours—as if all those tears had accumulated in me for years, without my being able to get out, and a floodgate had suddenly opened. I was very cold. Then I fell into a comatose sleep. Waking, I pissed myself.
The bill jammed between my buttocks stuck out, J. P. said, like an obscene provocation.
He removed the dildo gently—it felt as if he were extracting one of my internal organs. The pain returned en masse.
I was dying of thirst. He gave me a glass of water, then made coffee, and while waiting for it to be ready, put me under the shower.
I was one huge abrasion. The whip had flayed me like arable ground.
“Nathalie?” he asked, soaping me with infinite precautions.
I nodded. He made no comment.
He opened the window to air out the room, but to little avail. When I came back from the bathroom, the bitter odor of adrenaline, blood, and shit leapt to my nostrils. He made the bed, tucked me in gently, and served me a large cup of coffee. We hadn’t exchanged three words.
I wanted him to take me right there, immediately. Luckily, he did nothing. Expressed or not, there are some desires that others do well to resist.
He kissed me tenderly, paternally. I was nothing more than a rag doll. Lazarus must have felt like this when he emerged from his winding sheet. I started to cry, then fell asleep against my clean and slightly damp pillow.
When I wake up several hours later, he is sleeping next to me. As if he were dead.
The impression of being no more than an immense scar. A dull pain, with sudden, more violent flashes, sears my loins.
On the nightstand lies Nathalie’s one-hundred-franc bill, full of bloodstains.
“How did it happen?” I ask.
“That I came by? Luck. I found a poem for you. I wanted to read it to you.”
“For me? Did you write it?”
“No, of course not. Here, read it.”
He hands me a photocopy. There is a painting by Dali on the left. On the right, a drawing in pen and ink, the disturbing mask of an emaciated man, grimacing. Just above, this title: “The Persistence of Memory.” Lower, a movie still, and I recognize Serrault holding Isabelle Huppert on his knees, while Aurore Clement watches in the opening of a door. Beside the photo, surrounded by a stroke of yellow highlighter, are these lines:
Papa
“My sweet Daddy, you hurt me,”
she said.
But the papa who felt the fire in the engine
a little below his belly button
raped—
in the tunnel of the garden,
in the middle of the cave that inspired her—
Violette,
who then returned to her studies and,
betwixt the author of her sorrow,
and the mother meditating upon her vengeance,
finished
her next day’s homework
in which people proclaimed the holiness of the family.
It was signed: Benjamin Péret.
I look at J. P., disbelieving: “Where did you find this?”
“Hard to believe, isn't it? The Violette from the text is Violette Nozières, whom the Surrealists made so much of. I thought it would interest you.”
He has good intuition sometimes.
“Who’s in the mask on the right?”
“I checked: it’s a portrait of Freud by Dali. Exactly what it needed.”
“Don’t make too much of it, J. P. Don’t make too much of it.”
I fall asleep later thinking that some imaginary assaults are more violent than actual rapes.
A long winter month passed. I scarred over. A curious feeling of mourning overtook me and I grew accustomed to living with it. In my work, I kept trying to unite Plato and Tiresias. I imagined a ballet of intertwined bodies that separated little by little, then tried to find each other again—in vain. From this chaos emerged the character of Tiresias, but I had not yet decided if I would have a girl or boy play the part, because I did not imagine anyone in the role besides myself. Nathalie did not call me for a good two weeks. Then she reappeared as if nothing had happened (“Hello, how are you?”)—but without waiting for the answer, as in the banal small talk of the real world. She gave herself to me again with much tenderness and much insignificance. I cannot rid myself of the impression, still, that tenderness is a means of camouflaging that one no longer has very much to say.
Notes
1Twice I brought her girls, always under the pretext of photographing them. She would make them up, and we would take shots of them from every angle. Each of them consented to a threesome on the condition that Florence would merely be a bridge between her and myself, in order to exonerate herself of all suspicion of lesbianism. Both times, the scenario unrolled with the same implacable logic. The girl would begin by tolerating Florence’s caresses as long as I took care of—how shall I say it—the main activities of the scene. Then she would end up bobbing away at Florence’s belly like a buoy, trying to return a hundred times over the pleasure that had been given her. Neither one of them had ever been sodomized, or so they said. Florence’s mouth on their clitorises made them accept without complaint the dick that tore open their assholes—because I took them without excessive tenderness. Both tried to see her again. She would get undressed, but first there was, in one way or another, a plenary session in which we showed them the photos, some of which were taken at the height of passion. An exquisite moment of embarrassment. Reddened cheeks. Then smiles, abandon, and an orgy that Florence and I would disassociate ourselves from rather quickly. Afterwards, I would take them to a crêpes restaurant where we would hold forth on the merits, not so evident to sensibilities less refined than ours, of salted butter on sweet crêpes. Upon our return, they would stay only briefly; let’s just say that the perfume of the flower of the ches
tnut tree lingers longer than they did. Florence and I would quickly show them the door.
2Florence always had a hard time not defining herself with respect to literature, and it didn’t go any better with her in this respect than with those who define themselves by television series. The body and soul built of composite images. Freedom lies in liberating oneself from the perpetual flow of the soap opera.
3This is the only moment, in these too-truthful memoirs, in which Nathalie demonstrates a penchant for altruism. But I note, rereading this, how much this scene appears fabricated. Perhaps that’s how we recognize real charity: it rings false. Too bad.
4The naiveté of such an affirmation! That’s how life is: in the heat of the moment, one says stupid things. And wisdom comes too late.
5Nathalie knew what she was talking about. Very shortly afterwards, she gave me a brief glimpse of her autobiography. I still remember she had written, with that extraordinary taste she had for the crudest words: “You know why men go to whores? Of course the majority do it to have done what their spouses won’t do. If all of the proper ladies in the world knew how to suck cock, three-quarters of the professionals would be out of a job. But some men ask for much more than their wives would know how to give them, even when willing. I prostituted myself to earn enough to pay for my school and my sister’s; my mother drank up the rest. You can’t imagine how far I went for money. I was sixteen years old and some days, I didn’t even feel like a woman anymore. Not human, either. Not even animal. I had become the collar and leash. As obedient as a stone. A piece of flesh. Real debasement is not when someone buttfucks you—after all, that’s just something that will give you pleasure—but when you must offer your cunt to the German shepherd owned by the very respectable guy in the far stairway, who has such adorable blond children, and a nice, very prim and proper young wife, who doesn’t know that her husband is paying the young bimbo in the near stairway, second floor, to eat out his ass with her tongue, then lick his feet, while he whips her with his belt buckle. That he ties her up spreadeagle, her legs raised high, then buries into her cunt all the fruit and vegetables he can find, the ones his kids will eat later, the bananas for their afternoon snack, the zucchini and eggplant for the evening’s ratatouille, and don’t forget the Coke bottles. That he smears dog food on her pussy, and she cries from the depths of her soul because even when she feels the dog’s teeth rooting about in her labia, she knows she’ll come back next week anyway, because she desperately needs the one thousand francs. That he’ll ask her to fuck the dog next.” Without entirely believing her, I loved hearing these details, if only because I wanted to witness her frenzy of autodebasement, her complicity in the destruction of her self; then I would lustfully kiss that mouth that had nonetheless perhaps fornicated with dogs.
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