6Good torturers can sense, through their victims’ cries, that particular moment when the brain reverses the messages, or refuses, at the very least, to transmit suffering. They know when to stop, how to leave their prey the time to come back from this side of ecstasy, all in order to be able to make them suffer all over again.
Chapter XII
February
Imasturbated rarely then. At least, not while alone. I did it sometimes, of course, while making love—as when you want to climax quickly, but your orgasm is playing hide and seek, and you don’t want to wait any longer, you’ve had enough of being there. Alone, it was extremely rare. Between J. P. and Nathalie, I had the impression of covering the entire range of my desires, or nearly.
One night, I was surprised to discover I was caressing myself distractedly, with a languid finger, as in books, as if I did not know what I wanted to happen. But the story I was beginning to tell was already written in my head, though the first sentences were only then being articulated.
I am with Nathalie, bound as I have so often bound her, my spread legs flush against the headboard, my ankles tied, thighs open wide. My arms are spread, as if I were on a cross, and tied to the foot of the bed. We are alone. She strokes me, kissing me all the while (my finger becomes her finger, then is mine again, alternately), touches my breasts and pussy, jerks me off nonchalantly, much as I would do myself.
Then she disappears from my line of sight. I close my eyes.
I hear the terrible whistle of the whip manipulated at top speed and feel the bite of leather between my thighs.
Just as I strike her.
I begin to jerk off with frenzy, and I feel, genuinely feel, the terrible punishment that covers me with blood, from the interior of my thighs to my navel. In the middle of an imaginary, thrashing denunciation, which is much more cruel than any real punishment, I come hard, my back tense, eyes rolled back in my skull.
It should have ended there. My hand still plays with my overexcited flesh, and I watch, as if outside myself, without feeling anything, the sequel to the imaginary scene, the whip that rains blows, the torn sex, the blood that splatters the wall...
It is no longer Nathalie beating me, but a man wearing a leather hood and clothes. It is the hood I had bought for Nathalie, but the strands of hair on his neck are gray and dull.
Each blow of the whip bites away a bit of skin, a piece of flesh. He tears my sex bit by bit.
Mutilation...
Finally she sees him head-on. He stops beating her and, taking two steps towards the bed, slides to his knees between her spread, worked-over thighs. Leather hood and jerkin. He opens a sort of bulging codpiece, the kind they wore in the Middle Ages, takes out a cock of Biblical proportions, and puts it in her, in the middle of her bloody bush.
With each thrust of his loins he tears her. Each time he halfway pulls out of her, she has the impression his cock is covered with scales that point backwards, like a pheasant’s ruff or a samurai’s armor. He tears the inside of her cunt as he has already flayed the outside.
Mutilation...
The man finally comes—and doesn’t she know who he is, with his gray hair peeking out from the hood and those leather eyes—and it’s interminable, like hot acid running in her cunt, destroying everything, transforming her into a lake of blood. He pulls out of her, tearing her for the last time, turning her inside out, like a glove. An indistinct and reddish mass, still trembling, runs between her thighs onto the bed.
Suddenly, she does not know where he has gone.
She turns her head. Nathalie is there, lying on the floor, six feet from the bed. She calls to her, but she does not respond.
A voice comes from offstage, as if from the other side of the door: “But what have you done to the child? What have you done to the child?”
The voice repeats the same sentence again and again, with violent, hysterical intonations.
Then she begins to cry.
That’s what woke me up. It’s curious—no doubt I fell asleep after the orgasm, and the dream set the story in motion. Or was the story a ruse I clung to so the dream could manifest itself?
That’s the problem with dreams. The stories they tell are not necessarily true, being neither the reflection of nor the metaphor for true stories. Dreams offer you beautiful lies. Easy solutions to artificial problems.
I am drenched with sweat. My cunt feels abundantly wet, as if I’ve hemorrhaged during my period. I put my hand to my sex, look at my fingertips. But no, there’s nothing, nothing more than the usual liquids of pleasure.
I am in terrible pain. Great! Now I don’t even need to be whipped to be in pain.1
It is a little bit past two o’clock in the morning. I get up and drink a glass of water. I am not at all sleepy. I take down a book, read two pages; it falls from my hands.
I think again of what I had written about Tiresias.
I toss and turn. I get up and go into the bathroom. I pick up a pair of scissors and cut my hair very short. With the blue shadows under my eyes, my face without makeup, and my anxious expression, I look more and more like a young boy who is a little naïve, a little licentious.
I put on the gray outfit, the jacket and pants J. P. gave me, and a big fur-lined raincoat, and I go out into Paris.
Quai Conti, Quai Malaquais. I got off on the river side on the stairway across from the Vert-Galant, where the fireboat of the river firemen is moored.
It was humid and cold, very cold. The Seine had risen a lot in those last days, and there remained at best ten feet of stones safe from the waves.
Several drunks were sleeping at the foot of the Pont des Arts.
I kept walking. The water had invaded the banks so much that the barges at the quay were comfortably moored. I reached the arch, bathed in the night of the Pont Royal. Shadows moved in the darkness. Men, as usual.
The misery of homosexuality, of those who ventured there to finish the night looking for a final cock “for the road,” or to lie in wait for family men who came to give free rein to their fantasies at six o’clock in the morning on a winter day.
I kept going. I went towards the tip of the quay but could not reach the little stairwell that went back up towards the Rue du Bac. The river wet the feet of the large poplars and beat against the support works.
I retraced my steps, alone in my thoughts—more alone than I liked.
There were three of them, emerging from the shadows, and they seemed to be watching my return under the arches.
“So, little one, are we taking a walk?”
Leather, a mustache: a hoodlum a bit off the rails, that was pretty clear. But what did they want with me?
“I think she came to beat off,” another said. And then they all joined in.
“You think she came to get off?”
“Maybe faggots excite her?”
“That’s very possible.”
“You’re not a faggot, are you?”
“Because we don’t like faggots.”
“Could be a faggot.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me—looks like a faggot.”
“Is that true, are you a faggot?”
“A cocksucker, at least?”
The last to speak opened his fly and took out, with a flick of the wrist, a thick and respectable dick. I felt the situation was getting out of hand.
“Leave me alone, guys. I’m not bothering you.”
“You were right,” said the exhibitionist. “It’s a cunt.”
“Well, we like everybody, don’t we, fellas?”
“That’s right!”
They barred my way. I tried to pass, but one of them pushed me back, striking me on the shoulder.
“Do you really think it’s a cunt?” asked another one.
“It’s definitely a cunt, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t come here to get off.”
“A cunt and a cocksucker, if you want my opinion!”
And the circle closed around me.
I tried to resist, t
o force my way through.
They struck me immediately, suddenly, forcibly. I was almost lifted off the earth by the fist that pierced my belly.
My breath was cut off.
Somebody tore off my raincoat.
Another blow, on one of my breasts, hurt me horribly. Then a slap, very hard, and I saw stars. Two fists in the belly chopped me in half. I fell to my knees.
The one who had already halfbeaten me to death grabbed me by the hair and jammed his cock in my mouth.
He thrust in so deeply I gagged. I pulled back, tried to spit out that repugnant flesh. Someone gave me a kick in the kidneys.
In several seconds, they had torn off my jacket. In an instant of total panic, I saw a blade shine in the night. The guy slashed vertically across my stomach, cutting my belt and pants. Another guy tugged, and my pants fell off.
I dropped to my hands and knees with the next blow.
I sensed the blade of the knife slide down my back, and on its way back up, cut my shirt and the bottom strap of my bra.
Only my wrists were holding me up. Somebody kicked me in the side.
After that, I have only a linear vision of events.
Somebody lifts my head, and a cock is stuffed into my mouth.
The blade of the knife weighs on my throat, the tip jammed under my chin.
I take another violent blow to the kidneys—a sharp blow—a belt buckle, probably. Then another.
A guy behind me tries to force open my buttocks, and I contract them, resisting as best I can. Other kicks in the belly follow.
The best and worst that could have happened did; I collapse and almost lose consciousness. The icy chill of the wet stones keeps me from completely passing out.
Other kicks, other blows with the belt.
The guy who wields the knife leans over and stabs it into my right breast rather deeply from below.
He plasters me to the ground, my arms crossed, and again I feel hands trying to pull apart my buttocks. Fingernails dig into my flesh. Burning.
A violent blow on the nape of my neck, and for an instant there is no one, nothing.
When I come to, one guy is humping against my labia, and another is thrusting in my ass.
I convulse, throwing them off.
I hear a voice: “Whore, you’re going to get it now!”
An avalanche of kicks. Someone hits me very hard in my cunt with the point of a military pistol, and I faint for good.
I hear a barely audible voice from very far away: “Miss? Miss? Wake up! Come on! Come on! Help is here!”
I feel myself floating. I don’t even hurt anymore. I am in a soft, snowy place. I need only close my eyes again to slide into sleep.
I get a dose of water on the face; I choke a little, snort, then wake up altogether.
The pain sets in. The impression of being no more than a wound. A broken doll.
I open my eyes. Leaning over me is a guy in his fifties who smells good.
To the side, no less curious but more reserved: a dog with strangely clear eyes. I learn afterwards it is a weimaraner, whom his master calls Wagner, “although he was born in the year when you were supposed to choose only names beginning with a G.”
The man has a nervous but reassuring smile.
“Do you want me to go with you to the police station?”
He gets me on my feet, helps me pull up my pants, retrieves my jacket. As for my shirt, there’s nothing to be done. We never find the raincoat. Thrown into the Seine.
“No,” I say in one breath.
No, no cops! Definitely no cops! I wasn’t going to let a gang of men look at me, get a real eyeful, only to have them note “rape attempt” in a ledger and put me in a clinic where a sleepy intern would measure the extent of my bruises and perform the appropriate blood tests.
He helps me recross the tunnel. I am as weak as a baby learning to walk—and much less well-disposed. The beating of the water against the arches, amplified by the stones, seems enormously noisy. My head hurts, and I have a stomachache. A terrible need to vomit. The odor of cold urine doesn’t help.
As we emerge on the other side, a wave laps at my ankles.
Only the dog has the reflex to avoid the water’s flow.
Dogs dislike getting their paws wet as much as cats do.
It’s funny what thoughts will fill your head, once it’s been beaten in.
He repeats his offer to take me to the police station, file a complaint; he says they shouldn’t get away with it.
Again, I refuse.
I am at the end of my strength. The last fifty feet have finished me. It takes me a considerable period of time to climb the gentle ramp that gives cars access to the quay.
The thought of what I am ravages me, and I begin to cry silently.
He puts his arm around me.
“I live nearby,” he says. “Come.”
A small building on the Rue Bonaparte.
Louis (that was how he introduced himself) was an antique collector. A boutique below, a beautiful apartment on the second floor. His place was a perfection and a profusion.
Only little, delicate, and gracious things. A frozen avalanche of Sèvres biscuits placed on rosewood pedestal tables; a debauchery of Pompadour parquetry.
I looked at him through the haze of my exhaustion. He was nicely turned out for six o’clock in the morning.
He took me into a room decorated like a chambermaid’s boudoir. A door covered with a cheap imitation of a Watteau throw led to a completely white-and-gray bathroom of polished marble and granite, bright white tiles, the gray reflections of chrome and mirrors.
“Would you like—” he began.
“I’m fine,” I said.
I wasn’t at all fine. I closed the bathroom door and vomited.
It hurt a lot to get undressed—though I didn’t have much to take off. I couldn’t manage to get my heels free from my pants legs.
I was a thousand years old and devoid of memories.
I looked at myself in the mirrors, from the front and back at the same time.
I was covered with enormous bruises, especially on my stomach and loins. The skin had been opened in eight or ten places where the belt buckle had struck. I palpated my sides. Enormous pain, but nothing broken. My sex was as shattered as if it had been struck by an invisible stone. Under my right breast was a gash of an inch or so, as deep as a lance blow. Though I had been bleeding badly earlier, it had stopped. I gritted my teeth and disinfected the wound.
I felt flushed with the alcohol’s sting and thought I might faint again.
I leaned over and examined my ass in the vertical mirror. I felt nothing, saw nothing. Perhaps those bastards hadn’t had me after all.
Retrospectively, in one blow, I felt sick and I vomited again—bile, and nothing else, except for a little bit of blood.
What had they done to me?
I took a very long and very hot shower.
I found a gray peignoir that was a little bit big for me, in which I let myself be lost.2
Louis waited for me. I seemed so dazed, no doubt, that he instinctively took me in his arms, and I started to sob, without holding back this time.
He told me he had come by while they were covering me with kicks. Nothing in their attitude suggested they had “subjected me to the final outrages.” I appreciated his choice of words as much as his delicacy. Both distanced me from the facts.
“Rest,” he said.
I collapsed onto the bed, and fell asleep as one dies: in pain and in an endless void.
I woke up once because in a nightmare the same gray-haired hooded man had sewn up my vagina. The pain of my labia—crushed by kicking, no doubt.
I felt black and blue all over. Beaten to a pulp—that was definitely the appropriate expression.
It even hurt to smile.
I got up and drank a little bit of water.
And fell asleep again.
Louis was in his fifties. You never would have guessed it; he took care of him
self.
Discretely, but exclusively, homosexual.
“Why did they finally leave me alone?” I asked.
It was six P.M. Nearly one whole revolution of the clock. Teatime. Buttered bread, scones, and Earl Grey.
I felt reborn.
“I know them,” he said briefly.
“How?”
“I’ve run into them, mornings—”
“Sorry.”
That made him smile. This guy was marvelously indulgent.
I stayed with Louis for five days. I had never gotten along so well with a man.
I told him everything. (What was there so important to say, in the end?)
He encouraged me to keep at it. “Search farther,” he said. “The physical pain is nothing. It’s that other, older pain—a man in a hood, you say? Daddy?”
He snorted. He had said the word with an accent of terrible irony—as if summing up his whole life in two syllables.
I shook my head—to chase away the idea because I didn’t believe it.
“And that Nathalie! Ascesis through suffering! Nirvana through the whip! Idiocies! She has a score to settle and that’s all, and that’s enough, by God. But what score?”
I told him everything I had gleaned from talking with her mother and sister. The mausoleum. The death of her father.
“Maybe she feels guilty,” he said. “If it’s that, it’s irrecuperable. One can be very strong in the face of one’s own death—well, one may try—but one can do nothing before the death of others. You cannot accept it. So, when you also feel responsible—”
Sad Sister Page 11